Efficient Measurement Method for Spatiotemporal Compressive Data Gathering in Wireless Sensor Networks

By means of compressive sensing (CS) technique, this paper considers the collection of sensor data with spatiotemporal correlations in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In energy-constrained WSNs, one-dimensional CS methods need a lot of data transmissions since they are less applicable in fully exploiting the spatiotemporal correlations, while the Kronecker CS (KCS) methods suffer performance degradations when the signal dimension increases. In this paper, an appropriate sensing matrix as well as an efficient sensing method is proposed to further reduce the data transmissions without the loss of the recovery performance. Different matrices for the temporal signal of each sensor node are separately designed. The corresponding energy-efficient data gathering method is presented, which only transmitting a subset of sensor readings to recover data of the entire WSN. Theoretical analysis indicates that the sensing structure could have the relatively small mutual coherence according to the selection of matrix. Compared with the existing spatiotemporal CS (CS-ST) method, the simulation results show that the proposed efficient measurement method could reduce data transmissions by about 25% with the similar recovery performance. In addition, compared with the conventional KCS method, for 95% successful recovery, the proposed sensing structure could improve the recovery performance by about 20%. Keywords: Spatiotemporal correlations, Data gathering, Compressive sensing, Wireless sensor networks, Kronecker product.