Energy-aware interleaving for robust image transmission over visual sensor networks

In wireless visual sensor networks, the effect of transmission losses on the visual quality of images is always varying and depends on the burst loss length. Among the existing transmission error control techniques, interleaving can improve the visual quality of images without redundant data incurred. Conventionally a larger interleaving data size will be more effective in converting long burst loss into isolated losses. This is at the cost of transmitting more pixels. But how to effectively reduce individual sensor´s data load in an energy-constrained distributed transmission network is still an unsolved issue. An energy-aware interleaving algorithm is proposed to regulate burst loss effects by spreading out packets according to each image region´s pre-calculated transmission income. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed scheme can not only improve the end-to-end image transmission quality, but also prolong the lifetime of visual sensor network.