Bandlimited Field Reconstruction for Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract: Wireless sensor networks are often used for environmental monitoring applications. In this context sampling and reconstruction of a physical field is one of the most important problems to solve. We focus on a bandlimited field and find under which conditions on the network topology the reconstruction of the field is successful, with a given probability. We review irregular sampling theory, and analyze the problem using random matrix theory. We 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. Furthermore, we give the basis to analytically determine the probability of successful field reconstruction.