In industrial automation, several trends have been recently observed, such as condition monitoring in moving applications, robotics, drives, or assembly lines. In hygienic environments and retrofitting, avoiding cables can also be a major advantage. Regarding the given requirements, wireless sensor networks (WSN) offer a versatile solution and simple integration into various systems. Due to cable reduction, data transmission has to be wireless, and the power needs to be supplied by a battery. Multiple sensing devices can therefore be combined in an energy-efficient mesh topology network, where data is forwarded over different nodes to a gateway. The gateway can process the data or push it to any cloud or database. Some wireless mesh networks apply a cost-based routing related to energy consumption. To extend battery lifetime further, each node has to fulfill ultra-low power (ULP) requirements. In this presentation we will describe the design and the performance of a prototypical WSN. The selected hardware consists of a radio module, which administrates the connection to the wireless mesh network, a microcontroller to process data according to the customer's configuration and forward it to the radio module and a sensor frontend to acquire and provide data. The radio module operates at 2.4 GHz on the physical layer of Bluetooth and performs with ultra-low power consumption. The microcontroller applies various low-power modes in its different phases of the program flow. Most of the energy is consumed by the wireless transmission of data packets. To reduce energy consumption furthermore, multiple promising data compression and processing algorithms are evaluated. The additional energy consumption for data compression will be compared to the energy savings resulting from reduced wireless payload. Finally, numbers for the extended battery lifetime of the proposed WSN will be presented. This presentation is based on the HoLoDEC project, which is funded by the Bundesministerium für Bildung und Forschung under grant number 16ME0699.