A Survey of Compressive Data Gathering in WSNs for IoTs

Internet of Things (IoTs) are increasingly widespread in the field of health care, smart city and smart home application, industrial and agricultural monitoring, automation, etc. With its growing scale of networks, there are a large amount of data in IoTs needing to be sensed, transmitted, and processed. Resource-limited Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) as a perceptual layer of IoTs are hard to handle massive uncompressed sensing data. Compressive data gathering (CDG), which applies compressive sensing theory to data gathering, is a perfectly matching method for data compressing and gathering in WSNs. This promising method has attracted lots of researchers’ attention. In this paper, we attempt to survey substantial references about CDG in WSNs. According to their technology schemes, we classify the published references into three categories, i.e., routing protocol of CDG, clustering scheme of CDG, and CDG combined with other technologies. The merits and defects of each method are highlighted. Our work aims to provide an insight into CDG and promote improvements of this technology.