A Dynamic Programming Approach for QoS-Aware Power Management in Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Limited battery power at wireless video sensor nodes, along with the transmission quality requirements for video data, makes quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning in a wireless video sensor network a very challenging task. In this paper, a dynamic power-management framework is proposed for a wireless video sensor node to improve the energy-saving performance while satisfying video transmission quality requirements. This framework is developed based on a Markov decision process that considers the video traffic arrival process in the sensor node, the sleep and wakeup processes in the camera and wireless transceiver electronics, the queue status, and the wireless channel condition. A dynamic programming approach is used to find the optimum policy to achieve the desired performance measures in an energy-limited sensor node.