A Computational Approach to the Joint Design of Distributed Data Compression and Data Dissemination in a Field-Gathering Wireless Sensor Network

摘要

In this paper we present an approach to the joint design of distributed data compression and data dissemination for wireless sensor networks. We consider a wireless sensor network in which each sensor collects data (e.g., temperature) about the sensing field, transmits it back to a central collector/controller, which then combines the data from individual sensors to reconstruct and form a "snapshot" of the field, subsequently called a field-gathering wireless sensor network. Each sensor is constrained individually by the amount of energy that it possesses when it is deployed. Our goal is to prolong the functional lifetime of such a network and maximize the total number of snapshots the network can deliver (sample and transmit) to the collector via the proper selection of optimal routing pattern and optimal data rate allocation among all sensor nodes (using Slepian-Wolf type of encoding). We present a constrained maximization formulation for the joint optimization of routing and rate allocation. We solve this problem in the simple case ot a linear network and explore via numerical experiments the properties of optimal rate allocation and its relationship with optimal routing under a variety of scenarios.