Collaborative Image Transmissions Based on Region and Path Diversity in Wireless Sensor Network

Many sensor applications such as monitoring and surveillance may require image sensor array to conduct collaborative image transmissions in wireless sensor networks (WSN). The large size image transmissions cause bottlenecks in WSN due to the limited energy resources and network capacity. In this paper, we propose a collaborative transmission scheme for image sensors to utilize inter-sensor correlations to decide transmission patterns based on transmission path diversities, which achieves minimal energy consumption, balanced sensor lifetime and required image quality. This optimization scheme not only allows each image sensor to transmit optimal fractions of the overlapped images through appropriate transmission paths in energy-efficient way, but also provides unequal protection on the overlap image regions through path selections and resource allocations to achieve good transmission image quality. The simulation results show that the proposed image transmission scheme can achieve considerable gains in terms of the network lifetime extension, image distortion reduction, and energy efficiency.