An Architecture for Energy Efficient Image Transmission in WSNs

In traditional WSNs, sensor nodes usually compress the data before sending them to the cluster head. However, this strategy may not be suitable for image transmission. If the image compression task rests mostly on camera-equipped node, it will deplete its energy quickly. To prolong the network lifetime, a novel network architecture is proposed in this paper. Except the camera-equipped nodes, all the normal sensor nodes are organized into clusters. The camera-equipped node does not join the cluster nearby directly. It forms its own cluster and transmits the raw image to the members in the cluster. These members in the camera-node cluster also belong to the normal-node clusters. They share the task of image compression and take the responsibility to transmit the compressed image to the cluster head. Simulation results show that the proposed architecture can greatly prolong the lifetime of the network many times in the case of the sensor nodes deployed densely.