  Parallel acquisition systems arise in various applications in order to
moderate problems caused by insufficient measurements in single-sensor systems.
These systems allow simultaneous data acquisition in multiple sensors, thus
alleviating such problems by providing more overall measurements. In this work
we consider the combination of compressed sensing with parallel acquisition. We
establish the theoretical improvements of such systems by providing recovery
guarantees for which, subject to appropriate conditions, the number of
measurements required per sensor decreases linearly with the total number of
sensors. Throughout, we consider two different sampling scenarios -- distinct
(corresponding to independent sampling in each sensor) and identical
(corresponding to dependent sampling between sensors) -- and a general
mathematical framework that allows for a wide range of sensing matrices (e.g.,
subgaussian random matrices, subsampled isometries, random convolutions and
random Toeplitz matrices). We also consider not just the standard sparse signal
model, but also the so-called sparse in levels signal model. This model
includes both sparse and distributed signals and clustered sparse signals. As
our results show, optimal recovery guarantees for both distinct and identical
sampling are possible under much broader conditions on the so-called sensor
profile matrices (which characterize environmental conditions between a source
and the sensors) for the sparse in levels model than for the sparse model. To
verify our recovery guarantees we provide numerical results showing phase
transitions for a number of different multi-sensor environments.
