Encoding and communication energy consumption trade-off in H.264/AVC based video sensor network

Video sensor networks (VSN) offer an interesting platform for a distributed and flexible surveillance system. In such a system, video compression and wireless transmission are the major operations on each video node. For a battery-powered wireless video sensor, it is essential to maximize the power efficiency of these two operations. Currently, H.264/AVC is the most widely used ITU-T and ISO/IEC video coding standard. Previous works on determining the trade-off between compression and transmission that minimizes energy consumption consider oversimplified coding configurations, thus not taking full advantage of the flexibility and advanced features of H.264/AVC. Choosing the right configuration and setting parameters that lead to optimal encoding performance is of prime importance for video sensor network (VSN) applications, especially since VSN is constrained in terms of bandwidth and energy resources. This paper studies the relationship between the picture quality, the transmission rate, and the complexity of the encoder to expound the energy consumption trade-off between encoding and transmission in VSN. The results of our study can be used as guidelines in optimizing the overall power consumption of a VSN system as it detailed in the paper.