Distributed compressive data gathering in low duty cycled wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are gaining popularity in practical monitoring and surveillance applications. Because of the limited energy of sensor nodes, many WSNs work in a low duty cycle mode to effectively extend their network lifetime. However, low duty cycling also decreases transmission efficiency and makes data gathering more challenging. By exploiting the redundancy of in real sensing data, we propose a novel and distributed approach for data gathering in wireless sensor networks, employing the compressed sensing theory. Instead of selecting a fixed sink, all data can be retrieved from an arbitrary node within the network. Moreover, we use sequential observations to dynamically fit the sparsity of various data sets. With extensive simulations, we show that our approach is efficient with tunable accuracy in different node duty cycles.