Minimum transmission data gathering trees for compressive sensing in wireless sensor networks

Compressive sensing (CS) can reduce the number of data transmissions and balance the traffic load throughout networks. However, the total number of data transmissions required in CS method is still large. It is observed that there are many zero elements in the measurement matrix. In each round of data transmission in CS method, the sensor nodes corresponding to the zero elements in the measurement matrix do not have their own data to transmit. To further reduce the number of data transmissions in the network, we aim to compute a data gathering tree by taking advantages of these zero elements in the measurement matrix, such that the total number of data transmissions is minimized. We formulate the problem as linear programming with boolean variables. The problem is NP-hard. We propose heuristic algorithm to compute the Minimum Transmission Tree (MTT) for data gathering in CS methods. The MTT algorithm constructs a spanning tree by iteratively including the edge whose average incremental transmission cost is minimum. The simulation results demonstrate that our algorithm can reduce the number of transmissions significantly, compared with the methods using minimum spanning tree (MST), shortest path tree and the CS method with nonzero measurement coefficient using MST. © 2011 IEEE.