A Power Efficient Sensing/Communication Scheme: Joint Source-Channel-Network Coding by Using Compressive Sensing

We propose a joint source-channel-network coding scheme, based on compressive sensing principles, for wireless networks with AWGN channels (that may include multiple access and broadcast), with sources exhibiting temporal and spatial dependencies. Our goal is to provide a reconstruction of sources within an allowed distortion level at each receiver. We perform joint source-channel coding at each source by randomly projecting source values to a lower dimensional space. We consider sources that satisfy the restricted eigenvalue (RE) condition as well as more general sources for which the randomness of the network allows a mapping to lower dimensional spaces. Our approach relies on using analog random linear network coding. The receiver uses compressive sensing decoders to reconstruct sources. Our key insight is the fact that, compressive sensing and analog network coding both preserve the source characteristics required for compressive sensing decoding.