Random access compressed sensing over fading and noisy communication channels

Random Access Compressed Sensing (RACS) is an efficient method for data telemetry from a network of distributed sensors deployed in a challenging field environment with limited resources. RACS relies on integrating sensing with the communication architecture, in order to achieve overall efficiency in terms of the energy per bit of information successfully delivered to the fusion center. Targeting realistic deployment conditions, we consider data gathering over a Ricean fading channel and in the presence of communication noise. We provide a framework for system design and study the energy and bandwidth requirements of the network. We then show that compared to a conventional TDMA network with ARQ, RACS achieves significant energy and bandwidth savings. For example, for a network of 4000 nodes, we observe 10 dB gain in the energy as well as a 2.5-fold reduction in the required bandwidth.