Self-Orienting Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks for Maximizing Multimedia Coverage

The performance of a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) is tightly coupled with the pose of individual multimedia sensors. In particular, orientation of an individual multimedia sensor (direction of its sensing unit) is of great importance for the sensor network applications in order to capture the entire image of the field. In this paper, we study the problem of self-orientation in a wireless multimedia sensor network, that is finding the most beneficial pose of multimedia sensors to maximize multimedia coverage with occlusion-free viewpoints. We first propose a distributed algorithm to detect a node´s multimedia coverage and then determine its orientation, while minimizing the effect of occlusions and total overlapping regions in the sensing field. Our approach enables multimedia sensor nodes to compute their directional coverage, provisioning self-configurable sensor orientations in an efficient way. Simulations show that using distributed messaging and self-orientation having occlusion-free viewpoints significantly increase the multimedia coverage.