The Effect of Packets Relaying on the Implementation Issues of the Visual Sensor Node

Abstract

Wireless Visual Sensor Networks (WVSNs) are used for the monitoring of large and inaccessible areas. WVSNs are feasible today due to the advancement in many fields of electronics such as CMOS cameras, low power computing platforms, distributed computing and radio transceivers. The energy budget in a WVSN is limited because of the wireless nature of the applications and the small physical size of the Visual Sensor Node (VSN). The WVSN covers a large area where every node cannot transmit its results directly to the server. Receiving and forwarding other node’s packets consumes a large portion of the energy budget of the VSNs. This paper explores the effect of packets relaying in a multihop WVSN on the implementation issues of the VSN. It also explores the effect of node density in the multihop WVSN on the energy consumption, which in turn, has an impact on the lifetime of the VSN. Results show that the network topology does not affect the software implementation of the VSN because of the relatively high execution time of the image processing tasks on the microcontroller. For hardware implementation, network topology and node density does affect the architecture of the VSN due to the fact that communication energy consumption is dominant (because of the low execution time on FPGAs).

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5755/j01.eee.19.10.5912