A type of wireless sensor networks. The sensor nodes are capable of capture multimedia data about the environment. Besides the scalar sensor data, the nodes may generate video data, image data, or audio data about the monitored area.
Published in Chapter:
Enabling Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks
Jing Wang (University of Texas at Arlington, USA)
Copyright: © 2009
|Pages: 19
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-60566-046-2.ch002
Abstract
Wireless sensor networks have seen a wealth of research efforts and practical implementations in recent years. With the advance of CMOS cameras and microphones, wireless multimedia sensor networks are proposed to be a promising solution to a variety of applications in surveillance and intrusion detection, smart traffic control, automated health care, environmental monitoring, and so forth. It is composed of wirelessly connected small devices, which are able to capture multimedia data from the surrounding environment, besides its capabilities of processing the multimedia data using the embedded CPU and transmitting data to the sink through wireless communication. In this chapter, we firstly address features of WMSNs and challenges facing the realization of WMSNs by introducing two experimental applications of WMSNs. As energy efficient routing and distributed source coding are two critical components for the success of WMSNs, we discuss existing work in these two areas subsequently, in order to reveal details about the challenges and potential solutions to the problems posed by WMSNs. At the end of this chapter, open problems on cross-layer design, quality of information and privacy and security are briefly discussed.