Energy efficient image transmission using wireless embedded smart cameras

Wireless embedded smart cameras provide significant advantages for surveillance applications, due to their mobility and flexibility in deployment. Many surveillance applications rely on data exchange and image transmission through the network. Moreover, with the widespread use of smart phones and social media, image exchange through crowdsourcing can provide invaluable information for surveillance and investigation purposes. However, transmission of images consumes significant amount of energy, and energy is a limited resource for wireless embedded devices. So far, not much attention has been paid to the energy consumption of a static or mobile node during image transmission for different scenarios. In this paper, we present a new approach for image transmission, which employs a relay node and decreases the overall energy consumption of the sender and the relay nodes. We have performed the experiments with actual wireless embedded smart cameras (CITRIC), with TelosB motes, for a static as well as a mobile scenario. We have compared the energy consumption of the proposed method with that of a traditional relay approach, and that of not using a relay node at all. Experimental results show that, with the proposed relay approach, the energy consumption of image transmission can be reduced by up to 16% in a mobile scenario.