Low-Complexity Video Streaming for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract

In recent years, there has been intense research and considerable progress in solving numerous wireless sensor networking challenges. However, the key problem of enabling real-time quality-aware multimedia transmission over wireless sensor networks is largely unexplored. The large amount of data generated by most multimedia applications (compared to traditional scalar sensor networks), along with the higher QoS requirements make it difficult to meet the low energy use requirements of practical sensor networks. We explore the use of compressed sensing (aka “compressive sampling”) to reduce the energy required to encode and transmit high quality video in a severely resource-constrained environment. In this chapter, we will examine some of the major challenges of wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) implementation. Specifically, we examine what it would take to develop a WMSN that has similar performance (and restrictions) as a traditional scalar wireless sensor network (WSN). We then examine how we can use the new paradigm of compressed sensing (CS) to solve many of these problems.