Energy-efficient Time-Stampless Adaptive Nonuniform Sampling

Nowadays, since more and more battery-operated devices are involved in applications with continuous sensing, development of an efficient sampling mechanisms is an important issue for these applications. In this paper, we investigate power efficiency aspects of a recently proposed adaptive nonuniform sampling. This sampling scheme minimizes the energy consumption of the sampling process, which is approximately proportional to sampling rate. The main characteristics of our method are that, first, sampling times do not need to be transmitted, since the receiver can compute them by using a function of previously taken samples, and second, only innovative samples are taken from the signal of interest, reducing the sampling rate and therefore the energy consumption. We call this scheme Time-Stampless Adaptive Nonuniform Sampling (TANS). TANS can be used in several scenarios, showing promising results in terms of energy savings, and can potentially enable the development of new applications that require continuous signals sensing, such as applications related to health monitoring, location tracking and entertainment.