  We propose a distributed algorithm for solving the optimization problem Basis
Pursuit (BP). BP finds the least L1-norm solution of the underdetermined linear
system Ax = b and is used, for example, in compressed sensing for
reconstruction. Our algorithm solves BP on a distributed platform such as a
sensor network, and is designed to minimize the communication between nodes.
The algorithm only requires the network to be connected, has no notion of a
central processing node, and no node has access to the entire matrix A at any
time. We consider two scenarios in which either the columns or the rows of A
are distributed among the compute nodes. Our algorithm, named D-ADMM, is a
decentralized implementation of the alternating direction method of
multipliers. We show through numerical simulation that our algorithm requires
considerably less communications between the nodes than the state-of-the-art
algorithms.
