Efficient compressive sampling of spatially sparse fields in wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs), i.e., networks of autonomous, wireless sensing nodes spatially deployed over a geographical area, are often faced with acquisition of spatially sparse fields. In this paper, we present a novel bandwidth/energy-efficient compressive sampling (CS) scheme for the acquisition of spatially sparse fields in a WSN. The paper contribution is twofold. Firstly, we introduce a sparse, structured CS matrix and analytically show that it allows accurate reconstruction of bidimensional spatially sparse signals, such as those occurring in several surveillance application. Secondly, we analytically evaluate the energy and bandwidth consumption of our CS scheme when it is applied to data acquisition in a WSN. Numerical results demonstrate that our CS scheme achieves significant energy and bandwidth savings with respect to state-of-the-art approaches when employed for sensing a spatially sparse field by means of a WSN.