A method for an energy-aware selective compression scheme (EASCS) for solar-powered wireless sensor networks is provided. The method includes calculating an amount of residual energy of a battery in each of sensor nodes in a wireless sensor network, selecting one operation mode between a compression mode and a latency mode in reply to the amount of the residual energy, wherein the compression mode is a mode that data is compressed and transmitted, and the latency mode is a mode that the data is transmitted without compression, and compressing and transmitting the data if the compression mode in the each of the sensor nodes is selected, or transmitting the data without compression if the latency mode in the each of the sensor nodes is selected.Accordingly, end-to-end latencies of sensor networks can be reduced while blackout times thereof do not increase by implementing energy optimization in the wireless sensor network.