Design and Analysis of Compressive Data Persistence in Large-Scale Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper addresses the data persistence problem in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) where static sinks are not present and the sensed data have to be temporarily but resiliently stored in the network. Based on the observation that sensor readings are correlated, we propose compressive data persistence (CDP) scheme that makes use of the compressive sensing (CS) theory. Each sensor node independently computes and stores a random projection of the sensed data, such that a mobile sink can recover the data with high probability after visiting a small and random portion of the network. As a prerequisite of distributed CS encoding, sensor readings from all nodes are disseminated within the network through random walk. Therefore, the CS measurement matrix depends heavily on how the random walk is performed. In this paper, we present an in-depth analysis on the interplay between random walk parameters and sensing data characteristics, and derive the conditions in successful CS data recovery. In addition, we discover that there is a trade-off between the number of random walk instances and steps in order to achieve the required data persistence performance. Experiments using real sensor data verify that the proposed CDP scheme achieves much lower decoding ratio than the state-of-the-art Fountain code based schemes or the decentralized erasure codes based schemes, and demonstrate that there exist energy-optimized random walk parameters for CDP.