Cost-Aware Stochastic Compressive Data Gathering for Wireless Sensor Networks

Data gathering is a crucial function of wireless sensor networks (WSNs). In resource-limited WSNs, it is critical to improve cost-efficiency and prolong network lifetime. Sensor networks utilizing deterministic routing paths are particularly vulnerable to attacks. Additionally, repeated use of the same path will introduce load unbalance. In this paper, we propose a cost-aware stochastic compressive data gathering for WSNs. In contrast to traditional compressive sensing (CS) based algorithms that implicitly assume uniform transmission cost, our proposed scheme will consider the cost diversity into the CS data gathering framework. The Markov chain-based model will be used to characterize the stochastic data gathering process. An optimization problem is formulated to minimize the total expected cost subjected to the constraints on global degree of randomness and the recovery error. Our proposed algorithm requires less total expected cost to achieve certain level of recovery accuracy. It also prolongs network lifetime due to its load balancing features. Extensive simulations on both synthetic and real data show that the proposed algorithm significantly outperforms benchmark algorithms.