Ultra-lowpower compressive wireless sensing for distributed wireless networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) developed for the monitoring of critical military or civilian infrastructures are expected to have long life cycle with ultra-low power consumption. An ultra-low power wireless sensing scheme is developed by exploiting the unique features of infrastructure monitoring systems, which usually have long latency tolerance, low data rate, and strong correlation among data collected by spatially distributed sensors. The wireless sensor nodes asynchronously transmit measured data through a new exponential-interval media access control (EI-MAC) scheme, which can asymptotically almost surely (a.a.s.) achieve collision-free communication by leveraging on the long latency tolerance and low data rate of the system. Two low power sensing schemes, namely, compressive detection (CD) and compressive transmission (CT), are proposed in recognition of the strong correlation among data samples collected by n spatially distributed sensing nodes. Both the two schemes are fully scalable; have ultra-low power consumption; have less distortion compared to conventional schemes; and allow the sensing nodes to operate asynchronously without central control. Theoretical analysis shows that the normalized mean square distortion of the recovered information scales as.