Compressed sensing embedded in an operational wireless sensor network to achieve energy efficiency in long-term monitoring applications

Compressed sensing (CS) is a powerful new data acquisition paradigm that seeks to accurately reconstruct unknown sparse signals from very few (relative to the target signal dimension) random projections. The specific objective of this study is to save wireless sensor energy by using CS to simultaneously reduce data sampling rates, on-board storage requirements, and communication data payloads. For field-deployed low power wireless sensors that are often operated with limited energy sources, reduced communication translates directly into reduced power consumption and improved operational reliability. In this study, acceleration data from a multi-girder steel-concrete deck composite bridge are processed for the extraction of mode shapes. A wireless sensor node previously designed to perform traditional uniform, Nyquist rate sampling is modified to perform asynchronous, effectively sub-Nyquist rate sampling. The subNyquist data are transmitted off-site to a computational server for reconstruction using the CoSaMP matching pursuit recovery algorithm and further processed for extraction of the structure’s mode shapes. The mode shape metric used for reconstruction quality is the modal assurance criterion (MAC), an indicator of the consistency between CS and traditional Nyquist acquired mode shapes. A comprehensive investigation of modal accuracy from a dense set of acceleration response data reveals that MAC values above 0.90 are obtained for the first four modes of a bridge structure when at least 20% of the original signal is sampled using the CS framework. Reduced data collection, storage and communication requirements are found to lead to substantial reductions in the energy requirements of wireless sensor networks at the expense of modal accuracy. Specifically, total energy reductions of 10–60% can be obtained for a sensor network with 10–100 sensor nodes, respectively. The reduced energy requirements of the CS sensor nodes are shown to directly result in improved battery life and communication reliability.