Power Aware Communication in Wireless Pervasive Smart Camera Networks

Visual sensor networks bring together the research domains of smart cameras and wireless sensor networks. Focusing on power consumption and long-term deployments, typical sensor nodes come with limited computing power and low communication performance. A smart camera that performs on-board video analysis and exchanges data with adjacent nodes has higher computation and communication requirements. Therefore, a main challenge in visual sensor networks is to find a tradeoff between performance and power consumption. This work presents a camera prototype equipped with a low- and a high-performance radio allowing to trade communication performance for power consumption by selecting the appropriate device. Radio power consumption is evaluated for different modes of operation and a power model for clusters of dual-radio cameras is presented.