Deploying a pool of long-range wireless image sensor with shared activity time

Long-range radio technologies can connect remote sensors/IoT devices without the complex and costly deployment of relay nodes. In case of image sensors, the larger amount of data to transmit can rapidly results in a radio activity time greater than the duty-cycle limit allowed per hour. We propose an activity time sharing mechanism for a pool of image sensors deployed by a single organization. We propose to overcome the tight 36s/hour radio activity of a device by considering all the individual activity time in a shared/global manner. Devices that need to go beyond the activity time limitation can borrow activity time from other devices to provide better surveillance service guarantee. Providing simple, low-cost, long-range connectivity with the possibility of sharing activity time can make large-scale data-intensive applications such as visual surveillance a reality. The proposition is implemented on our low-cost image sensor platform and preliminary tests show that the proposed mechanism is fully functional.