A Distortion-Minimizing Rate Controller for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

The availability of inexpensive CMOS cameras and microphones that can ubiquitously capture multimedia content from the environment is fostering the development of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), i.e., distributed systems of wirelessly networked devices that can retrieve video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data. A new cross-layer rate control scheme for WMSNs is introduced in this paper with a twofold objective: maximize the video quality of each individual video stream; and maintain fairness in the domain of video quality between different video streams.