Fairness scheme for energy efficient H.264/AVC-based video sensor network

Abstract

The availability of advanced wireless sensor nodes enable us to use video processing techniques in a wireless sensor network (WSN) platform. Such paradigm can be used to implement video sensor networks (VSNs) that can serve as an alternative to existing video surveillance applications. However, video processing requires tremendous resources in terms of computation and transmission of the encoded video. As the most widely used video codec, H.264/AVC comes with a number of advanced encoding tools that can be tailored to suit a wide range of applications. Therefore, in order to get an optimal encoding performance for the VSN, it is essential to find the right encoding configuration and setting parameters for each VSN node based on the content being captured. In fact, the environment at which the VSN is deployed affects not only the content captured by the VSN node but also the node’s performance in terms of power consumption and its life-time. The objective of this study is to maximize the lifetime of the VSN by exploiting the trade-off between encoding and communication on sensor nodes. In order to reduce VSNs’ power consumption and obtain a more balanced energy consumption among VSN nodes, we use a branch and bound optimization techniques on a finite set of encoder configuration settings called configuration IDs (CIDs) and a fairness-based scheme. In our approach, the bitrate allocation in terms of fairness ratio per each node is obtained from the training sequences and is used to select appropriate encoder configuration settings for the test sequences. We use real life content of three different possible scenes of VSNs’ implementation with different levels of complexity in our study. Performance evaluations show that the proposed optimization technique manages to balance VSN’s power consumption per each node while the nodes’ maximum power consumption is minimized. We show that by using that approach, the VSN’s power consumption is reduced by around 7.58% in average.