Wireless multimedia sensor network platform for low rate mage/video streaming

Abstract

Conventional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) application mainly deals with scalar data such as temperature, humidity, pressure and light, which are very suitable for low rate and low power networking technology such as IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The availability of commercially off the shelf (COTS) complementary metal-oxide semiconductor (CMOS) camera has made a single chip solution possible and consequently fostered researchers to push WSN a step further. Multimedia data delivery unique properties posed new challenges for resource-constrained sensor networks. Transferring raw data is very expensive while sensor nodes processing power put a serious limitation on it for any sophisticated multimedia processing. This project proposed a new platform for wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) namely TelG mote and WiseOS operating system to support the mote operation. The mote design for WMSN consists of ATmega644PV microcontroller from Atmel Co. as its processing unit, XBee module as its communication unit and C328R CMOS camera as its sensing unit. To hide low-level details of TelG motes such as processor management, memory management, device management, scheduling policies and multitasking, the developed WiseOS provides a clear application programming interface (API) to the application developer. WiseOS is designed to be monolithic, event-driven and using first-in first-out (FIFO) scheduler policy. The low rate video/image streaming application that was developed shows that multi-hop communication for multimedia content in WMSN using TelG mote supported by WiseOS proved to be practical. © Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.