Abstract: It is difficult for data gathering via a fixed code rate in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) to achieve reliable recovery. Compared with the fixed code rate, rateless codes can continuously send a code word to the sink node until the source node information is recovered. Thus, data gathering methods based on rateless codes are effective in achieving reliable data in the sink node. However, to achieve high reliability, a large amount of sensor data must be collected, and this greatly increases the energy consumption of sensor nodes and the storage space of the sink nodes. Fortunately, data gathering via compressed sensing (CS) can largely reduce the number of sensor data collected to further save energy consumption and storage space. This paper proposes a data gathering method via rateless codes and CS. The proposed method can not only achieve reliable recovery, but also save energy consumption of data collection and storage space of the sink nodes. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce energy consumption by about 40% and storage space by about 40% compared with the data gathering via LT codes, which are a typical rateless code.

Key words: data gathering, wireless sensor networks, compressed sensing, rateless codes, LT codes