Compressed Sensing Based Protocol for Interfering Data Recovery in Multi-Hop Sensor Networks

We consider a multi-hop wireless sensor network that measures sparse events and propose a novel protocol based on Compressed Sensing (CS) as an alternative to traditional Media Access Control (MAC) scheduling and routing protocol. Instead of avoiding collisions, our CS-based protocol exploits interferences by superimposing the data measurements "over-the-air", simultaneously received at any node. Thanks to our protocol design, each node is able to recover and forward only new data towards the sink. Our protocol achieves near zero reconstruction errors at the sink, while greatly reducing overhead and delays compared to conventional methods. These results reveal a new and promising approach to protocol design through CS.