Sparse event detection in wireless sensor networks using compressive sensing

Compressive sensing is a revolutionary idea proposed recently to achieve much lower sampling rate for sparse signals. For large wireless sensor networks, the events are relatively sparse compared with the number of sources. Because of deployment cost, the number of sensors is limited, and due to energy constraint, not all the sensors are turned on all the time. In this paper, the first contribution is to formulate the problem for sparse event detection in wireless sensor networks as a compressive sensing problem. The number of (wake-up) sensors can be greatly reduced to the similar level of the number of sparse events, which is much smaller than the total number of sources. Second, we suppose the event has the binary nature, and employ the Bayesian detection using this prior information. Finally, we analyze the performance of the compressive sensing algorithms under the Gaussian noise. From the simulation results, we show that the sampling rate can reduce to 25% without sacrificing performance. With further decreasing the sampling rate, the performance is gradually reduced until 10% of sampling rate. Our proposed detection algorithm has much better performance than the l₁-magic algorithm proposed in the literature.