Trade-Off Between Reliability and Energy Cost for Content-Rich Data Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the power of energy-constrained sensor nodes is largely drained by data communication tasks. Designing energy-efficient data communication mechanisms is, therefore, a major key to maximizing the life-time of wireless sensor networks. This challenge is magnified for visual sensor networks, where the collected and transmitted data is often very large and composed of multiple signals (Infrared signals, audio and video) which have different and varying Quality of Service requirements (QoS). Motivated by this challenge, the authors investigate a forward error correction recovery mechanism for multi-path data transmission in wireless sensor networks.