2.6 Properties of random measurements
In addition to offering substantially reduced measurement rates, CS has many attractive and in-
triguing properties, particularly when we employ random projections at the sensors. Random
measurements are universal in the sense that any sparse basis can be used, allowing the same en-
co ding strategy to be app lied in different sens ing environments. Random measurements are also
future -proof: if a better sparsity-inducing basis is found for the s ignals, then the same measurements
can be used to recover a more accurate view of the environment. Random cod ing is also robust: the
measurements coming from each sens or have equal priority, unlike Fourier or wavelet coefficients in
current coders. Finally, random measurements allow a progressively better recovery of the data as
more measurements are obtained; one or more measurements can also be lost without corrupting
the entire recovery.
2.7 Related work
Several researchers have formulated joint measurement settings for CS in sensor networks that
exploit inter-signal correlations [28–32]. In their approaches, each sen sor n ∈ {1, 2, . . . , N} simul-
taneously records a single reading x(n) of some spatial field (temperature at a certain time, for
example).
4
Each of the sensors generates a p s eu dorandom sequence r
n
(m), m = 1, 2, . . . , M, and
modulates the reading as x(n)r
n
(m). Each sensor n then transmits its M numbers in sequ en ce to
the collection point where the measurements are aggregated, obtaining M measurements y(m) =
P
N
n=1
x(n)r
n
(m). T hus, defining x = [x(1), x(2), . . . , x(N)]
T
and φ
m
= [r
1
(m), r
2
(m), . . . , r
N
(m)],
the collection point automatically receives the measurement vector y = [y(1), y(2), . . . , y(M)]
T
=
Φx after M trans mission s teps. The samples x(n) of the spatial field can then be recovered using
CS provided that x has a sparse representation in a known b asis. These methods have a major
limitation: since they operate at a single time instant, they exploit only inter-signal and not intra-
signal correlations; that is, they essentially assume that the sensor field is i.i.d. from time instant
to time instant. In contrast, we will develop signal mod els and algorithms that are agnostic to the
spatial sampling structure and that exploit both inter- and intra-signal correlations.
Recent work has adapted DCS to the finite rate of innovation signal acquisition framework [47]
and to the continuous-time setting [48]. Since the original submission of this paper, additional work
has focus ed on the analysis and proposal of recovery algorithms for jointly sparse signals [49, 50].
3 Joint Sparsity Signal Models
In this section, we generalize the notion of a signal being sparse in some basis to the notion of an
ensemble of signals being jointly sparse.
3.1 Notation
We will use the following notation for signal ensembles and our measurement model. Let Λ :=
{1, 2, . . . , J} denote the set of indices for the J signals in the ensemble. Denote the signals in the
ensemble by x
j
, with j ∈ Λ and assume that each signal x
j
∈ R
N
. We use x
j
(n) to denote sample
n in signal j, and assume for the sake of illustration — but without loss of generality — that these
signals are sparse in the canonical basis, i.e., Ψ = I. The entries of the signal can take arbitrary
real values.
We denote by Φ
j
the measurement matrix for signal j; Φ
j
is M
j
× N and, in general, the
entries of Φ
j
are different for each j. Thus, y
j
= Φ
j
x
j
consists of M
j
< N random measurements
4
N
ote t hat in Section 2.7 only, N refers t o the number of sensors, since each sensor acquires a signal sample.
8