A two-hop clustered image transmission scheme for maximizing network lifetime in wireless multimedia sensor networks

In traditional wireless sensor networks, normal sensor nodes which measure scalar physical phenomena like temperature, pressure and humidity usually compress the data before sending them out to minimize the communication energy consumption. However, this strategy may not be suitable for image transmission in wireless multimedia sensor networks. In the traditional clustering structure, when the camera-equipped node or the cluster head compresses the images, an energy hole will appear. This is a key factor that affects the lifetime of the network. To avoid the energy hole problem, a two-hop clustered image transmission scheme is proposed in this paper. In the proposed scheme, many redirectors are used to compress and forward the images for the purpose of reducing energy consumption of the camera-equipped node and the cluster head. With adaptive adjustment of the transmission radius in the camera cluster and tasks allocation based on the residual energy of the normal sensor nodes by the camera-equipped node, the energy consumption of the nodes in the network is balanced. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme can prolong the network lifetime dramatically in the case of the sensor nodes deployed densely.