Share risk and energy: Sampling and communication strategies for multi-camera wireless monitoring networks

In the context of environmental monitoring, outdoor wireless cameras are vulnerable to natural hazards. To benefit from the inexpensive imaging sensors, we introduce a multi-camera monitoring system to share the physical risk. With multiple cameras focusing at a common scenery of interest, we propose an interleaved sampling strategy to minimize per-camera consumption by distributing sampling tasks among cameras. To overcome the uncertainties in the sensor network, we propose a robust adaptive synchronization scheme to build optimal sampling configuration by exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless communication. The theory as well as simulation results verify the fast convergence and robustness of the algorithm. Under the interleaved sampling configuration, we propose three video coding methods to compress correlated video streams from disjoint cameras, namely, distributed/independent/joint coding schemes. The energy profiling on a two-camera system shows that independent and joint coding perform substantially better. The comparison between two-camera and single-camera system shows 30%-50% per-camera consumption reduction. On top of these, we point out that MIMO technology can be potentially utilized to push the communication consumption even lower.