RA-CVS: Cooperating at low power to stream compressively sampled videos

Video streaming applications are becoming increasingly popular as low priced video-enabled mobile devices (such as smart phones) become more common. However, traditional video streaming systems are not designed for mobile devices, and require both high computational complexity at the video sensor and very high channel quality to achieve good performance. Our recently proposed compressive video sensing (CVS) video streaming system is a low complexity, low power compressed-sensing-based encoder designed to address these challenges. However, even using CVS, the energy consumption of multimedia sensors is still much higher than that of traditional scalar sensors. In this article, we present a cooperative relay-assisted compressed video sensing (RA-CVS) system that takes advantage of the error resilience of video encoded using CVS to maintain good video quality at the receiver while significantly reducing the required SNR, and therefore the required transmission power at the multimedia sensor node. This system uses the natural error resilience of CS encoded video signals to design a cooperative scheme that directly reduces the mean squared error (MSE) of the reconstructed CS samples representing a video frame, which allows the receiver to correctly reconstruct the video even at very low SNR levels. The proposed system is tested using both simulation and USRP2 testbed evaluation and is shown to outperform traditional cooperative systems in terms of received video quality as a function of channel SNR.