Cooperative relaying architecture for wireless video sensor networks

We propose a new cooperative relaying architecture for delivering aggregated high-rate video data to the destination (base station) in wireless sensor networks. The proposed approach is to make each relay node to detect only a subset (called sub-stream) of the data stream and all relay nodes to forward their sub-streams simultaneously over the same physical channel. Then, multiple receive antennas at the destination allow the sub-streams to be detected separately based on their spatial characteristics. The distinctive benefit of this approach is the reduction of transmit and receive processing requirements on each relay node, while providing significant savings in the transmit and receive energy, particularly in the high spectral efficiency regime. Therefore, the proposed approach is particularly attractive for sending high-rate video data in wireless sensor networks, where each relay can handle only low-rates due to limited resources in terms of energy, bandwidth, hardware, and space (size). The proposed relaying architecture also provides an additional physical layer security mechanism over the traditional network layer security provision mechanisms.