Energy efficient information collection in wireless sensor networks using adaptive compressive sensing

We consider the problem of using Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to measure the temporal-spatial field of some scalar physical quantities. Our goal is to obtain a sufficiently accurate approximation of the temporal-spatial field with as little energy as possible. We propose an adaptive algorithm, based on the recently developed theory of adaptive compressive sensing, to collect information from WSNs in an energy efficient manner. The key idea of the algorithm is to perform "projections" iteratively to maximise the amount of information gain per energy expenditure. We prove that this maximisation problem is NP-hard and propose a number of heuristics to solve this problem. We evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithms using data from both simulation and an outdoor WSN testbed. The results show that our proposed algorithms are able to give a more accurate approximation of the temporal-spatial field for a given energy expenditure.