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
