Sparsest Random Scheduling for Compressive Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

Compressive sensing (CS)-based in-network data processing is a promising approach to reduce packet transmission in wireless sensor networks. Existing CS-based data gathering methods require a large number of sensors involved in each CS measurement gathering, leading to the relatively high data transmission cost. In this paper, we propose a sparsest random scheduling for compressive data gathering scheme, which decreases each measurement transmission cost from O(N) to O(log(N)) without increasing the number of CS measurements as well. In our scheme, we present a sparsest measurement matrix, where each row has only one nonzero entry. To satisfy the restricted isometric property, we propose a design method for representation basis, which is properly generated according to the sparsest measurement matrix and sensory data. With extensive experiments over real sensory data of CitySee, we demonstrate that our scheme can recover the real sensory data accurately. Surprisingly, our scheme outperforms the dense measurement matrix with a discrete cosine transformation basis over 5 dB on data recovery quality. Simulation results also show that our scheme reduces almost 10 × energy consumption compared with the dense measurement matrix for CS-based data gathering.