Fundamentals of Large Sensor Networks: Connectivity, Capacity, Clocks and Computation

Sensor networks potentially feature large numbers of nodes that can sense their environment over time, communicate with each other over a wireless network, and process information. They differ from data networks in that the network as a whole may be designed for a specific application. We study the theoretical foundations of such large scale sensor networks, addressing four fundamental issues- connectivity, capacity, clocks and function computation. To begin with, a sensor network must be connected so that information can indeed be exchanged between nodes. The connectivity graph of an ad-hoc network is modeled as a random graph and the critical range for asymptotic connectivity is determined, as well as the critical number of neighbors that a node needs to connect to. Next, given connectivity, we address the issue of how much data can be transported over the sensor network. We present fundamental bounds on capacity under several models, as well as architectural implications for how wireless communication should be organized. Temporal information is important both for the applications of sensor networks as well as their operation.We present fundamental bounds on the synchronizability of clocks in networks, and also present and analyze algorithms for clock synchronization. Finally we turn to the issue of gathering relevant information, that sensor networks are designed to do. One needs to study optimal strategies for in-network aggregation of data, in order to reliably compute a composite function of sensor measurements, as well as the complexity of doing so. We address the issue of how such computation can be performed efficiently in a sensor network and the algorithms for doing so, for some classes of functions.Comment: 10 pages, 3 figures, Submitted to the Proceedings of the IEE

Recursive Compressed Sensing

We introduce a recursive algorithm for performing compressed sensing on streaming data. The approach consists of a) recursive encoding, where we sample the input stream via overlapping windowing and make use of the previous measurement in obtaining the next one, and b) recursive decoding, where the signal estimate from the previous window is utilized in order to achieve faster convergence in an iterative optimization scheme applied to decode the new one. To remove estimation bias, a two-step estimation procedure is proposed comprising support set detection and signal amplitude estimation. Estimation accuracy is enhanced by a non-linear voting method and averaging estimates over multiple windows. We analyze the computational complexity and estimation error, and show that the normalized error variance asymptotically goes to zero for sublinear sparsity. Our simulation results show speed up of an order of magnitude over traditional CS, while obtaining significantly lower reconstruction error under mild conditions on the signal magnitudes and the noise level.Comment: Submitted to IEEE Transactions on Information Theor

Distributed optimization on directed graphs based on inexact ADMM with partial participation

We consider the problem of minimizing the sum of cost functions pertaining to agents over a network whose topology is captured by a directed graph (i.e., asymmetric communication). We cast the problem into the ADMM setting, via a consensus constraint, for which both primal subproblems are solved inexactly. In specific, the computationally demanding local minimization step is replaced by a single gradient step, while the averaging step is approximated in a distributed fashion. Furthermore, partial participation is allowed in the implementation of the algorithm. Under standard assumptions on strong convexity and Lipschitz continuous gradients, we establish linear convergence and characterize the rate in terms of the connectivity of the graph and the conditioning of the problem. Our line of analysis provides a sharper convergence rate compared to Push-DIGing. Numerical experiments corroborate the merits of the proposed solution in terms of superior rate as well as computation and communication savings over baselines