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 varies, depending on the length of burst loss. Among the existing transmission error control techniques, interleaving can improve the visual quality of images without redundant data. And the larger the interleaving data size is, the more effectively a longer burst loss is converted into isolated losses, which is at the cost of more pixels to be transmitted. But it is still an unavoidable issue that how to efficiently reduce individual sensor´s data load for the purpose of energy-constrained distributed transmission. Therefore, an energy-aware interleaving algorithm is proposed in this paper, which regulates burst loss effects by spreading out packets according to each image region´s pre-calculated transmission income. Experimental results demonstrate that, due to the balance of pre-calculated transmission income, the proposed scheme can not only improve the end-to-end image quality, but also prolong the lifetime of visual sensor network.