Spatially Distributed Sampling and Reconstruction

A spatially distributed system contains a large amount of agents with limited sensing, data processing, and communication capabilities. Recent technological advances have opened up possibilities to deploy spatially distributed systems for signal sampling and reconstruction. In this paper, we introduce a graph structure for a distributed sampling and reconstruction system by coupling agents in a spatially distributed system with innovative positions of signals. A fundamental problem in sampling theory is the robustness of signal reconstruction in the presence of sampling noises. For a distributed sampling and reconstruction system, the robustness could be reduced to the stability of its sensing matrix. In a traditional centralized sampling and reconstruction system, the stability of the sensing matrix could be verified by its central processor, but the above procedure is infeasible in a distributed sampling and reconstruction system as it is decentralized. In this paper, we split a distributed sampling and reconstruction system into a family of overlapping smaller subsystems, and we show that the stability of the sensing matrix holds if and only if its quasi-restrictions to those subsystems have uniform stability. This new stability criterion could be pivotal for the design of a robust distributed sampling and reconstruction system against supplement, replacement and impairment of agents, as we only need to check the uniform stability of affected subsystems. In this paper, we also propose an exponentially convergent distributed algorithm for signal reconstruction, that provides a suboptimal approximation to the original signal in the presence of bounded sampling noises.