Towards Energy Neutrality in Energy Harvesting Wireless Sensor Networks: A Case for Distributed Compressive Sensing?

This paper advocates the use of the emerging distributed compressive sensing (DCS) paradigm in order to deploy energy harvesting (EH) wireless sensor networks (WSN) with practical network lifetime and data gathering rates that are substantially higher than the state-of-the-art. In particular, we argue that there are two fundamental mechanisms in an EH WSN: i) the energy diversity associated with the EH process that entails that the harvested energy can vary from sensor node to sensor node, and ii) the sensing diversity associated with the DCS process that entails that the energy consumption can also vary across the sensor nodes without compromising data recovery. We also argue that such mechanisms offer the means to match closely the energy demand to the energy supply in order to unlock the possibility for energy-neutral WSNs that leverage EH capability. A number of analytic and simulation results are presented in order to illustrate the potential of the approach.Comment: 6 pages. This work will be presented at the 2013 IEEE Global Communications Conference (GLOBECOM), Atlanta, US, December 201

Imaging With Nature: Compressive Imaging Using a Multiply Scattering Medium

The recent theory of compressive sensing leverages upon the structure of signals to acquire them with much fewer measurements than was previously thought necessary, and certainly well below the traditional Nyquist-Shannon sampling rate. However, most implementations developed to take advantage of this framework revolve around controlling the measurements with carefully engineered material or acquisition sequences. Instead, we use the natural randomness of wave propagation through multiply scattering media as an optimal and instantaneous compressive imaging mechanism. Waves reflected from an object are detected after propagation through a well-characterized complex medium. Each local measurement thus contains global information about the object, yielding a purely analog compressive sensing method. We experimentally demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach for optical imaging by using a 300-micrometer thick layer of white paint as the compressive imaging device. Scattering media are thus promising candidates for designing efficient and compact compressive imagers.Comment: 17 pages, 8 figure

Rate-distortion Balanced Data Compression for Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents a data compression algorithm with error bound guarantee for wireless sensor networks (WSNs) using compressing neural networks. The proposed algorithm minimizes data congestion and reduces energy consumption by exploring spatio-temporal correlations among data samples. The adaptive rate-distortion feature balances the compressed data size (data rate) with the required error bound guarantee (distortion level). This compression relieves the strain on energy and bandwidth resources while collecting WSN data within tolerable error margins, thereby increasing the scale of WSNs. The algorithm is evaluated using real-world datasets and compared with conventional methods for temporal and spatial data compression. The experimental validation reveals that the proposed algorithm outperforms several existing WSN data compression methods in terms of compression efficiency and signal reconstruction. Moreover, an energy analysis shows that compressing the data can reduce the energy expenditure, and hence expand the service lifespan by several folds.Comment: arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1408.294

TopSig: Topology Preserving Document Signatures

Performance comparisons between File Signatures and Inverted Files for text retrieval have previously shown several significant shortcomings of file signatures relative to inverted files. The inverted file approach underpins most state-of-the-art search engine algorithms, such as Language and Probabilistic models. It has been widely accepted that traditional file signatures are inferior alternatives to inverted files. This paper describes TopSig, a new approach to the construction of file signatures. Many advances in semantic hashing and dimensionality reduction have been made in recent times, but these were not so far linked to general purpose, signature file based, search engines. This paper introduces a different signature file approach that builds upon and extends these recent advances. We are able to demonstrate significant improvements in the performance of signature file based indexing and retrieval, performance that is comparable to that of state of the art inverted file based systems, including Language models and BM25. These findings suggest that file signatures offer a viable alternative to inverted files in suitable settings and from the theoretical perspective it positions the file signatures model in the class of Vector Space retrieval models.Comment: 12 pages, 8 figures, CIKM 201

Heterogeneous Networked Data Recovery from Compressive Measurements Using a Copula Prior

Large-scale data collection by means of wireless sensor network and internet-of-things technology poses various challenges in view of the limitations in transmission, computation, and energy resources of the associated wireless devices. Compressive data gathering based on compressed sensing has been proven a well-suited solution to the problem. Existing designs exploit the spatiotemporal correlations among data collected by a specific sensing modality. However, many applications, such as environmental monitoring, involve collecting heterogeneous data that are intrinsically correlated. In this study, we propose to leverage the correlation from multiple heterogeneous signals when recovering the data from compressive measurements. To this end, we propose a novel recovery algorithm---built upon belief-propagation principles---that leverages correlated information from multiple heterogeneous signals. To efficiently capture the statistical dependencies among diverse sensor data, the proposed algorithm uses the statistical model of copula functions. Experiments with heterogeneous air-pollution sensor measurements show that the proposed design provides significant performance improvements against state-of-the-art compressive data gathering and recovery schemes that use classical compressed sensing, compressed sensing with side information, and distributed compressed sensing.Comment: accepted to IEEE Transactions on Communication