Dynamic protocol stacks in smart camera networks

The term Internet of Things is often used to talk about the trend of embedding microprocessors in everyday devices and connecting them to the Internet. The Internet of Things poses challenging communication requirements since the participating devices are heterogeneous, resource-constrained and operate in an ever changing environment. To cope with those requirements, academic research projects have proposed novel network architectures, such as the Dynamic Protocol Stack (DPS) architecture. In this paper, we use smart camera networks as an example of the Internet of Things and evaluate the DPS architecture in this scenario. Our smart camera nodes are implemented as an FPGA-based system-on-chip architecture that uses the DPS architecture for the network communication. We evaluate our smart camera nodes in two case studies. In the first case study, we demonstrate that our proposed smart camera network can track a single object over the field of view of several camera nodes. In the second case study, we show that an adaptive hardware/software mapping of the network functionality can save about 22% of the FPGA resources as compared to a static mapping. The hardware/software mapping can be adapted at a processing delay of a single video frame.