On the suitability of compressive sampling for the implementation of low-cost multi-channels synchronous data acquisition system

Nowadays the most of the technical applications require the acquisition and the processing of signals coming from many sensors disseminated in the measurement field. Typically, to reduce the cost of the overall measurement process, the above-mentioned tasks are performed by devices as microcontroller, low cost Data Acquisition Systems (DAS), Field Gate Programmable arrays (FPGA), and so on. This is even more true when smart-sensors, or wireless sensor networks, applications are considered. These devices are characterized by some main limitations concerning with the reduced quantity of internal memory, and the use of multiplexer devices to share the same Analog to Digital Converter (ADC) over different physical channels. The former limitation influences the maximum observation time these devices are able to collect with a single shot acquisition, the latter imposes unwanted phase shifting on the acquired signals. The use of modern acquisition and processing techniques might overcame some of these issues. One of these is the Compressive Sampling (CS) that promise the capability of signal reconstruction starting from very low acquired samples. To this aim the paper deals with the design of this technique on a few cost multi-channel data acquisition systems (DASs) as that of low cost devices such as 8 or 16-bit microcontrollers. Aim of the paper is the analysis of the accuracy of reconstructed data and phase shifting recovery.