Impact of fading on random access compressed sensing

We address the design of a large-scale sensor network, deployed for long-term environmental monitoring. Taking into account the sparse nature of the monitored field, we integrate the sensing and the communication aspects of the network into an efficient Random Access Compressed Sensing (RACS) scheme. RACS is inspired by the theory of compressed sensing and employs random channel access to collect a sufficient number of observations at the fusion center to reconstruct the field. In this paper, we study the impact of fading on RACS. We provide a framework for system design that specifically targets a Rayleigh fading channel. Moreover, we quantify the energy and bandwidth requirements and provide analytical results demonstrating the robustness of RACS in the presence of fading.