Novel communication architectures for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are net works of interconnected devices that allow retrieving video and audio streams, still images, and scalar data from the environment. With the ability of providing enriched observation of the environment, WMSNs can enhance a wide range of applications such as environmental monitoring, industrial process control, traffic enforcement, and advanced health care delivery. Most of these applications require the sensor network paradigm to be re-thought in view of the need for mechanisms to deliver multimedia content with a pre-defined level of quality of service (QoS). In this presentation, two novel communication architectures will be proposed to achieve the efficient delivery of multimedia content in WMSNs. The first one is a cross-layer communication architecture based on the time-hopping impulse radio ultra wide band (UWB) technology. The UWB technology has the potential to enable low power consumption, high data rate communications within tens of meters, which make it an ideal choice for WMSNs. The architecture aims at providing QoS support in the domains of through put, delay, and reliability for heterogeneous applications, based on a modular cross-layer controller that performs admission control, routing, scheduling, bandwidth assignment and channel coding. Performance evaluation shows that the architecture is a promising solution to satisfy the performance targets of WMSNs. Furthermore, a correlation-based communication architecture is introduced. In WMSNs, the observations of video sensors with overlapped field of views are correlated with each other, which leads to considerable data redundancy in the network. A novel spatial correlation model is designed to predict the correlation among video sensors through low computation and communication costs. Then, the correlation of video sensors is utilized to design clustered source coding, QoS routing, and scheduling protocols for WMSNs. Performance evaluation results sho- - w that, by integrating correlation-aware operations in the communication protocols, the energy efficiency and networking performance of WMSNs could be improved significantly. To conclude this presentation, a list of open research problems and future challenges are discussed.