On Data Acquisition And Field Reconstruction In Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are often used for environmental monitoring applications. Sampling and reconstruction of a physical field is therefore one of the most important problems to solve. We focus on band-limited fields and investigate the relationship between the random topology of a sensor network and the quality of the reconstructed field. By reviewing irregular sampling theory, we derive some guidelines on how sensors should be deployed over a spatial area for efficient data acquisition and reconstruction. We analyze the problem using random matrix theory and show that even a very irregular spatial distribution of sensors may lead to a successful signal reconstruction, provided that the number of collected samples is large enough with respect to the field bandwidth.

(Invited Paper)

This work was supported through the PATTERN project