Trade-off between Reliability and Energy Cost for Content-Rich Data Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, the power of energy- constrained sensor nodes is largely drained by data communication tasks. Designing energy-efficient data communication mechanisms is, therefore, a major key to maximizing the life-time of wireless sensor networks. This challenge is magnified for visual sensor networks, where the collected and transmitted data is often very large and composed of multiple signals (Infrared signals, audio, video, ...) which have different and varying quality of service requirements (QoS). Motivated by this challenge, we investigate a forward error correction recovery mechanism for multi-path data transmission in wireless sensor networks. Based on this mechanism, we propose a fast algorithm for the trade-off between the end-to-end energy cost and reliability requirement of multi-path data transmission. Under the practical considerations of a fixed transmission power and a realistic modulation scheme, we derive the reliability and expected energy cost metrics of transmission paths. We then demonstrate the efficiency of our algorithm through simulations and discuss future work.