Development of Energy Efficient Image/Video Sensor Networks

Image/Video Sensor Networks are emerging applications for sensor network technologies. The relatively high energy consuming image capturing process and the large size of the data collected by image/video sensors presents new challenges for the sensor network in terms of energy consumption and network capacity. We propose to address these issues through the use of a high density network deployment. A high density network allows network nodes to conserve power by reducing their transmission power and simultaneously increases the potential for spatially concurrent transmissions within the network, resulting in improved network throughput. Furthermore, with the use of additional relay nodes, we allow a communication density that differs from the sensing density. A higher communication density has the potential to further increase the spatially concurrent transmission. Moreover, this reduces the relay burden of the sensor node, thus conserving sensor energy. In this work, we show analytically how a high density network design effectively improves energy consumption and network capacity. Furthermore, we discuss the constraints placed on a high density sensor network deployment due to application latency requirements, sensor coverage requirements, connectivity requirements, and node costs.