Optimal Sink Deployment for Distributed Sensing of Spatially Nonstationary Phenomena

The optimal deployment of sinks in a sensor region for power efficient data gathering of a physical phenomenon is investigated in this work. In the system of consideration, nodes perform lossless distributed coding of the sensed data and the spatial statistics of the monitored phenomenon are possibly nonstationary due to heterogeneity in the sensing environment (e.g. variations in the altimetric profile). Non-stationary spatial statistics lead to uneven spatial profiles of the bit rates, unlike stationary statistics. The properties of rate profiles and the consequent optimal sink locations for a broad class of spatially non-stationary covariance models are studied by mathematical analysis and numerical examples.