Agile sink selection in wireless sensor networks

The conventional setup of a wireless sensor network is composed of several sensor nodes and one or more sinks. The network topology and data collection techniques are then optimized towards efficient collection of the sensed data at the sink(s). In this paper, we present a novel network coding technique based on Compressed Sensing that allows each node to operate as a sink. Our network coding technique efficiently disseminates a number of linear combinations of the sensed data. After the dissemination phase, the entire sensed data is available by querying any node of the network. This is especially useful for distributed control using a wireless sensor and actuator network or in scenarios where the end user needs to access the global state of the environment from any node in its vicinity; e.g., when the end user is mobile.