Energy-Efficient Sensor Censoring for Compressive Distributed Sparse Signal Recovery

To strike a balance between energy efficiency and data quality control, this paper proposes a sensor censoring scheme for distributed sparse signal recovery via compressive-sensing based wireless sensor networks. In the proposed approach, each sensor node employs a sparse sensing vector with known support for data compression, meanwhile enabling making local inference about the unknown support of the sparse signal vector of interest. This naturally leads to a ternary censoring protocol, whereby each sensor (i) directly transmits the real-valued compressed data if the sensing vector support is detected to be overlapped with the signal support, (ii) sends a one-bit hard decision if empty support overlap is inferred, (iii) keeps silent if the measurement is judged to be uninformative. Our design then aims at minimizing the error probability that empty support overlap is decided but otherwise is true, subject to the constraints on a tolerable false-alarm probability that non-empty support overlap is decided but otherwise is true, and a target censoring rate. We derive a closed-form formula of the optimal censoring rule; a low complexity implementation using bi-section search is also developed. In addition, the average communication cost is analyzed. To aid global signal reconstruction under the proposed censoring framework, we propose a modified l_1-minimization based algorithm, which exploits certain sparse nature of the hard decision vector received at the fusion center. Analytic performance guarantees, characterized in terms of the restricted isometry property, are also derived. Computer simulations are used to illustrate the performance of the proposed scheme.Comment: 30 pages, 9 figure

Application of Compressive Sensing Techniques in Distributed Sensor Networks: A Survey

In this survey paper, our goal is to discuss recent advances of compressive sensing (CS) based solutions in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) including the main ongoing/recent research efforts, challenges and research trends in this area. In WSNs, CS based techniques are well motivated by not only the sparsity prior observed in different forms but also by the requirement of efficient in-network processing in terms of transmit power and communication bandwidth even with nonsparse signals. In order to apply CS in a variety of WSN applications efficiently, there are several factors to be considered beyond the standard CS framework. We start the discussion with a brief introduction to the theory of CS and then describe the motivational factors behind the potential use of CS in WSN applications. Then, we identify three main areas along which the standard CS framework is extended so that CS can be efficiently applied to solve a variety of problems specific to WSNs. In particular, we emphasize on the significance of extending the CS framework to (i). take communication constraints into account while designing projection matrices and reconstruction algorithms for signal reconstruction in centralized as well in decentralized settings, (ii) solve a variety of inference problems such as detection, classification and parameter estimation, with compressed data without signal reconstruction and (iii) take practical communication aspects such as measurement quantization, physical layer secrecy constraints, and imperfect channel conditions into account. Finally, open research issues and challenges are discussed in order to provide perspectives for future research directions