The resources of node in wireless sensor networks are limited. If the vibration signal is collected and transmitted in real-time, because the signal changes rapidly and the amount of data is large, on the one hand, the node will be invalidated because of the early exhaustion of resources, on the other hand, there is a lot of data storage space which the PC should takes. In order to solve the problem mentioned above, a compression and coding algorithm is proposed for vibration signal, it is also programmed and implanted to DSP in sensor node. The algorithm is as follows: first, the vibration data is processed by 5/3 lifting wavelet, and then the wavelet coefficients obtained are compressed and coded by embedded zerotree wavelet. In order to further improve the compression ratio, and for the sensor node which can transfer data easily, the results above are com pressed and coded by huffman algorithm. The decoding, decompression and reconstruction of data are completed by software in PC. Finally, the effects of selection of initial threshold and wavelet decomposition levels to compression efficiency are discussed. The experimental results show that the vibration data can be compressed effectively (compression ratio up to 9.5), while retaining the main features of vibration signal in frequency domain, the data transmitted is greatly reduced, the resources of network node and the storage space of PC are saved.