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1
Compressed Sensing Signal and Data Acquisition in
Wireless Sensor Networks and Internet of Things
Shancang Li, Li Da Xu, and Xinheng Wang
Abstract—The emerging compressed sensing (CS) method
reduces the number of sampling points that directly correspond
to the volume of data collected, which means that part of
the data that would be thrown away is never acquired. This
enables the creation of net-centric and stand-alone applications
with fewer resources required in internet of things (IoT). CS-
based signal and information acquisition/compression paradigm
combines the nonlinear reconstruction algorithm and random
sampling in a sparse basis that provides a promising approach to
compressing signal and data in information systems. This paper
investigates how CS can provide new insights into data sampling
and acquisition in wireless sensor networks and IoT. At first, we
briefly introduce the CS theory in aspects of the sampling and
transmission coordination during the network lifetime through
providing simple coding process with low computation costs.
Next, a compressed sensing-based framework is proposed for
networks, in which the nodes measure, transmit, and store
the sampled data in the compressed sensing framework. Then,
a cluster-sparse reconstruction algorithm is proposed for in-
network compression aiming at more accurate data reconstruc-
tion and longer network lifetime. Performance is evaluated with
respect to network size using datasets acquired by a real-life
deployment.
Index Terms—Compressed sensing, Wireless Sensor Networks,
Industrial Informatics, Internet of Things, Information Systems,
Enterprise Systems
I. INTRODUCTION
Researchers found that, in information systems, wireless
sensor networks (WSNs), and Internet of Things (IoT), many
types of information have a property called sparseness in trans-
formation process which allows certain number of samples
enabling capturing all required information without loss of
information even after reduction [1], [2], [3], [4]. The emerg-
ing IoT is a technological revolution that represents the future
of computing and communications [1], [2]. IoT is designed
to be a world-wide network of interconnected objects, and its
development depends on technological innovation in a number
of fields from WSNs to nanotechnology [2], [3], [4]. In IoT-
based information systems, an unobtrusive and cost-effective
Manuscript received December 28, 2011; accepted February 14, 2012.
This work was partially supported by the NSFC (National Natural Science
Foundation of China) Grants 71132008, 81101118, and 60972038, Changjiang
Scholar Program of the Ministry of Education of China, and the US National
Science Foundation Grant 1044845.
Copyright (c) 2009 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted.
However, permission to use this material for any other purposes must be
obtained from the IEEE by sending a request to pubs-permissions@ieee.org.
S. Li and X. Wang are with College of Engineering, Swansea University,
Swansea SA2 8PP, UK (Phone: +44-1792-602802, fax: +44-1792-602802,
Email:s.li@swansea.ac.uk).
L. Xu is with the Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy
of Sciences, Beijing 100190, China; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA
23529, USA (lxu@odu.edu).
data acquisition system is necessary to collect and process data
[2].As the advances in miniaturization and nanotechnology
imply that the interconnected objects may have the ability to
interact and connect, these developments will create an IoT
that connects objects in both a sensory and an intelligent
manner [3], [5], [6]. WSNs have the potential of a wide
range of applications in many industrial systems. WSNs can
be integrated into the IoT, which consists of a number of
interconnected sensor nodes [3], [4], [5].
It is possible that an IoT system can be with thousands of
independent components including computers, sensors, RFID
tags, or mobile phones, all capable of generating and commu-
nicating data, in which many techniques are used or developed
for data collection, processing, and compression [2], [4], [7].
In IoT, a desirable data compression ratio is very important,
which cannot be obtained by current methods without in-
troducing unacceptable distortions [8], [9]. Furthermore, for
most data compression problems in IoT, three main problems
must be solved: resolution, sensitivity, and reliability [2], [10],
[11], [12]. Recently, an effective data compression theory has
emerged that shows the data can be reconstructed from far
fewer samples (measurements) than what the Nyquist/Shannon
sampling theory states. This new CS theory relies on the
compressibility of signals, or more precisely, on the property
that signals can be sparsely represented [3], [4], [8], [13]. From
the compressed sensing viewpoints, sparse signals could be
acquired at low sampling rates without loss of information
[14]. The compressed sensing changes the rule of data acqui-
sition game in information systems by exploiting a priori data
sparsity information [5].
This paper considers a particular situation that involves with
distributed information source of data and their acquisition,
transmission, storage, and processing in a large scale IoT
[15]. The task of transmitting information from one node to
another is a common task, however, the problem of efficient
acquisition, storage, and transmitting from and among a large
number of source nodes remains a great challenge in large-
scale networked systems [4], [14].
Consider a network of n nodes in which each node has
a piece of information or data x
j
, j = 1, . . . n. Assume
that each x
j
is a scalar value. Collectively these data x =
[x
1
, . . . , x
n
]
T
is arranged in a vector, namely measurements.
These measurements are distributed and can be shared over
the network. Since the IoT may be very large, the process
of gathering x at a single node is inefficient and unreliable.
However, it is possible to effectively construct a highly com-
pressed decentralized version of x, which can be processed to
reconstruct x within a reasonable accuracy [4], [16], [17].