A Novel Partial Dynamic Reconfiguration Image Sensor Node for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) develop rapidly in recent years. Compared to traditional wireless sensor network (WSN), the WMSN is image-based and processing intensive. Such image-based WSN node normally has a serious conflict between the limited resource and the large amount of image data to be processing and transmitting. Additionally, the security is also a big problem when transmitting sensitive images. This paper presents a novel partial dynamic reconfiguration (PDR) image sensor node prototype for WMSN to solve the problems above. Firstly, reconfigurable hardware such as FPGA (Field-programmable Gate Array) is adopted to accelerate data processing and JPEG image compression algorithm with less power consumption in the WMSN sensor node. Secondly, a partial dynamic reconfiguration system is designed for the sensor node to acquire multiple compression ratios and to enhance the safety by working with AES encryption which is proposed for the first time.