Cooperative STBC with fuzzy election applied to surveillance wireless video sensor networks

Wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs) have obtained popularity due to numerous potential applications such as video surveillance, environmental and habitat monitoring, etc. Transmitting video over WVSNs requires large bandwidth as well as lifetime of sensor nodes long enough to fulfill the application requirements. This paper proposes an integrated system for WVSNs (mainly used for surveillance) that combines the use of adaptive cooperative diversity and fuzzy logic. The cooperative space-time block codes (STBC) are used to achieve full diversity with a simple maximum-likelihood decoding algorithm in order to enhance the performance of the considered WVSN. The performance comparison between the proposed system and a non-cooperative scheme is presented based on network lifetime, quality of transmitted videos, and required number of retransmissions under varying propagation scenarios in a WVSN. Simulation results show better performance for the proposed system.