Adaptive multimedia transmission in wireless sensor networks

Daniel G. Costa; Luiz Affonso Guedes; Francisco Vasques; Paulo Portugal

Daniel G. Costa Department of Technology, State University of Feira de Santana; Department of Computing and Automation, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte; IDMEC/ISR, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
Luiz Affonso Guedes Department of Computing and Automation, Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte
Francisco Vasques IDMEC/ISR, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto
Paulo Portugal IDMEC/ISR, Faculty of Engineering, University of Porto

Resumo

Multimedia transmissions over wireless sensor networks may provide valuable information of the monitored field, enhancing monitoring and control applications. However, multimedia streaming can considerably shorten the expected lifetime of battery-operated sensor networks due to the large amount of information to be transmitted from multimedia enabled source nodes. On the other hand, multimedia data may have different relevancies for the application, depending on the performed monitoring tasks and the application requirements. In such context, we propose an adaptive context-aware energy efficient multimedia transmission approach, where intermediate nodes may consider its current residual energy level and preconfigured energy thresholds to decide if multimedia packets must be relayed to the next hop or silently discarded. Doing so, energy is saved and the expected network lifetime is enlarged, with controlled impact on the overall monitoring quality.