A Distributed Compressive Sensing Technique for Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Compressive sensing is a new technique utilized for energy efficient data gathering in wireless sensor networks. It is characterized by its simple encoding and complex decoding. The strength of compressive sensing is its ability to reconstruct sparse or compressible signals from small number of measurements without requiring any a priori knowledge about the signal structure. Considering the fact that wireless sensor nodes are often deployed densely, the correlation among them can be utilized for further compression. By utilizing this spatial correlation, we propose a joint sparsity-based compressive sensing technique in this paper. Our approach employs Bayesian inference to build probabilistic model of the signals and thereafter applies belief propagation algorithm as a decoding method to recover the common sparse signal. The simulation results show significant gain in terms of signal reconstruction accuracy and energy consumption of our approach compared with existing approaches.