Exploiting the sensing relevancies of source nodes for optimizations in visual sensor networks

  • Authors:

  • Daniel G. Costa;Luiz Affonso Guedes

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Computing and Automation, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil 59072-970 and Department of Technology, State University of Feira de Santana, Feira de Santana, Bra ...;Department of Computing and Automation, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, Natal, Brazil 59072-970

  • Venue:
  • Multimedia Tools and Applications
  • Year:
  • 2013

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Abstract

Wireless ad-hoc networks composed of resource-constrained camera-enabled sensors can provide visual information for a series of monitoring applications, enriching the understanding of the physical world. In many cases, source nodes may have different sensing relevancies for the monitoring functions of the applications, according to the importance of the visual information retrieved from the monitored field. As a direct result, high quality is only required for the most relevant information and, as it is expected that many visual monitoring applications can tolerate some quality loss in the data received from the least relevant source nodes, the network operation can be optimized exploiting this innovative concept. As a novel global QoS parameter, we envisage that the sensing relevancies of source nodes can be considered for a series of optimizations in different aspects of the wireless sensor network operation, achieving energy saving or assuring high quality transmission for the most relevant data. In this paper we discuss some approaches for the establishment of the sensing relevancies of the nodes and propose a protocol to support them. Moreover, we present two practical examples of optimizations based on the sensing relevancies of source nodes that transmit still images of the monitored field, addressing issues as energy-efficient data transmission and packet prioritization in intermediate nodes.