Energy-Efficient Over-the-Air Computation Scheme for Densely Deployed IoT Networks

In this article, we propose a spatial sampling approach to reduce energy consumption for over-the-air (function) computation (AirComp) scheme by utilizing the cross-correlations among sensor readings. Since the conventional AirComp scheme leads to a reduction in total transmission time and latency thanks to the joint communication and computation processes, it is especially well-suited to Internet of Things (IoT) monitoring systems. AirComp lets simultaneous transmissions of all nodes by exploiting the superposition property of wireless channel; however, it does not overcome the high energy consumption paradigm, which is a fundamental problem of densely deployed IoT monitoring systems. We present a minimum mean square error (MMSE) estimation scheme while a small number of observations are available for densely deployed networks. The proposed MMSE estimator provides a significant mean squared error improvement with reducing energy consumption compared to the conventional estimator. Since the network lifetime of IoT monitoring systems can be almost doubled, the proposed estimator provides flexibility for the dense deployment of nodes. The simulation results verify the theoretical expressions.