Distributed Quality-Lifetime Maximization in Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Owing to the availability of low-cost and low-power CMOS cameras, Wireless Video Sensor Networks (WVSN) has recently become a reality. However video encoding is still a costly process for energy and capacity constrained sensor nodes and this urges the vitality of the control over the network lifetime. In this paper the authors propose a distributed quality-lifetime control algorithm where quality is simply measured by the visual signal quality. In order to formulate the quality-lifetime problem, they consider the Power-Rate-Distortion (P-R-D) model of the video encoder together with the rate control, medium access and routing functions of the underlying communication protocol and formulate it as a Generalized Network Utility Maximization (GNUM) problem.