  Wireless sensor networks (WSN), i.e. networks of autonomous, wireless sensing
nodes spatially deployed over a geographical area, are often faced with
acquisition of spatially sparse fields. In this paper, we present a novel
bandwidth/energy efficient CS scheme for acquisition of spatially sparse fields
in a WSN. The paper contribution is twofold. Firstly, we introduce a sparse,
structured CS matrix and we analytically show that it allows accurate
reconstruction of bidimensional spatially sparse signals, such as those
occurring in several surveillance application. Secondly, we analytically
evaluate the energy and bandwidth consumption of our CS scheme when it is
applied to data acquisition in a WSN. Numerical results demonstrate that our CS
scheme achieves significant energy and bandwidth savings wrt state-of-the-art
approaches when employed for sensing a spatially sparse field by means of a
WSN.
