Non-uniform compressive sensing in wireless sensor networks: Feasibility and application

In this paper, we consider the problem of using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to measure the temporal-spatial profile of some physical phenomena. We base our work on two observations. Firstly, most physical phenomena are compressible in some transform domain basis. Secondly, most WSNs have some form of heterogeneity. Given these two observations, we propose a non-uniform compressive sensing method to improve the performance of WSNs by exploiting both compressibility and heterogeneity. We apply our proposed method to a real WSN data set. We find that our method can provide a more accurate temporal-spatial profile for a given energy budget compared with other sampling methods.