Gossip Algorithms for Distributed Signal Processing

Gossip algorithms are attractive for in-network processing in sensor networks because they do not require any specialized routing, there is no bottleneck or single point of failure, and they are robust to unreliable wireless network conditions. Recently, there has been a surge of activity in the computer science, control, signal processing, and information theory communities, developing faster and more robust gossip algorithms and deriving theoretical performance guarantees. This article presents an overview of recent work in the area. We describe convergence rate results, which are related to the number of transmitted messages and thus the amount of energy consumed in the network for gossiping. We discuss issues related to gossiping over wireless links, including the effects of quantization and noise, and we illustrate the use of gossip algorithms for canonical signal processing tasks including distributed estimation, source localization, and compression.Comment: Submitted to Proceedings of the IEEE, 29 page

Optimal Compression and Transmission Rate Control for Node-Lifetime Maximization

We consider a system that is composed of an energy constrained sensor node and a sink node, and devise optimal data compression and transmission policies with an objective to prolong the lifetime of the sensor node. While applying compression before transmission reduces the energy consumption of transmitting the sensed data, blindly applying too much compression may even exceed the cost of transmitting raw data, thereby losing its purpose. Hence, it is important to investigate the trade-off between data compression and transmission energy costs. In this paper, we study the joint optimal compression-transmission design in three scenarios which differ in terms of the available channel information at the sensor node, and cover a wide range of practical situations. We formulate and solve joint optimization problems aiming to maximize the lifetime of the sensor node whilst satisfying specific delay and bit error rate (BER) constraints. Our results show that a jointly optimized compression-transmission policy achieves significantly longer lifetime (90% to 2000%) as compared to optimizing transmission only without compression. Importantly, this performance advantage is most profound when the delay constraint is stringent, which demonstrates its suitability for low latency communication in future wireless networks.Comment: accepted for publication in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communicaiton

Signal Recovery From 1-Bit Quantized Noisy Samples via Adaptive Thresholding

In this paper, we consider the problem of signal recovery from 1-bit noisy measurements. We present an efficient method to obtain an estimation of the signal of interest when the measurements are corrupted by white or colored noise. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed framework is the pioneer effort in the area of 1-bit sampling and signal recovery in providing a unified framework to deal with the presence of noise with an arbitrary covariance matrix including that of the colored noise. The proposed method is based on a constrained quadratic program (CQP) formulation utilizing an adaptive quantization thresholding approach, that further enables us to accurately recover the signal of interest from its 1-bit noisy measurements. In addition, due to the adaptive nature of the proposed method, it can recover both fixed and time-varying parameters from their quantized 1-bit samples.Comment: This is a pre-print version of the original conference paper that has been accepted at the 2018 IEEE Asilomar Conference on Signals, Systems, and Computer

Graded quantization for multiple description coding of compressive measurements

Compressed sensing (CS) is an emerging paradigm for acquisition of compressed representations of a sparse signal. Its low complexity is appealing for resource-constrained scenarios like sensor networks. However, such scenarios are often coupled with unreliable communication channels and providing robust transmission of the acquired data to a receiver is an issue. Multiple description coding (MDC) effectively combats channel losses for systems without feedback, thus raising the interest in developing MDC methods explicitly designed for the CS framework, and exploiting its properties. We propose a method called Graded Quantization (CS-GQ) that leverages the democratic property of compressive measurements to effectively implement MDC, and we provide methods to optimize its performance. A novel decoding algorithm based on the alternating directions method of multipliers is derived to reconstruct signals from a limited number of received descriptions. Simulations are performed to assess the performance of CS-GQ against other methods in presence of packet losses. The proposed method is successful at providing robust coding of CS measurements and outperforms other schemes for the considered test metrics

Non-Adaptive Distributed Compression in Networks

In this paper, we discuss non-adaptive distributed compression of inter-node correlated real-valued messages. To do so, we discuss the performance of conventional packet forwarding via routing, in terms of the total network load versus the resulting quality of service (distortion level). As a better alternative for packet forwarding, we briefly describe our previously proposed one-step Quantized Network Coding (QNC), and make motivating arguments on its advantage when the appropriate marginal rates for distributed source coding are not available at the encoder source nodes. We also derive analytic guarantees on the resulting distortion of our one-step QNC scenario. Finally, we conclude the paper by providing a mathematical comparison between the total network loads of one-step QNC and conventional packet forwarding, showing a significant reduction in the case of one-step QNC.Comment: Submitted for 2013 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theor