An implementation of battery-aware wireless sensor network using ZigBee for multimedia service

To support multimedia service in WSN (wireless sensor network), there are two important design issues: how to make efficient use of network bandwidth and how to increase the life time of nodes. It is known that an industry standard for WSN - ZigBee has been recently finalized for TEXT data transmission. However, it has many problems as far as multimedia services (grabbing audio/video data) are concerned. In this paper, we first introduce ZigBee-based WSN, then discuss its problems in supporting multimedia services, and finally propose our reference design that can overcome these problems. The design proposed includes the aspects of sensor node's hardware and software architecture, network configuration and data transmission. In the end of this paper, we present our implementation of a WSN using a ZigBee device to validate the feasibility of our design.