VISION: Video-oriented UWB-based intelligent ubiquitous sensing

VISION is an innovative infrastructure providing real-time sensing services, with particular emphasis on 3D video, with mobile and context-aware operation. Hence, it has addressed the numerous challenges raised by the limitations of current technology for wireless sensor networks. VISION exploits the 60 GHz ultra-wide band radios to enable broadband transmissions, miniaturized devices and reduced interference. Due to the inherent high resource consumption of broadband wireless necessary for real-time 3D video, VISION sensor network has been optimized at all layers. Novel techniques to manage the huge number of nodes required by ubiquitous sensing, and innovative tools to support the development process of intelligent services have been designed. Full cross-layer adaptability to external conditions assure the system will be able to manage the available resources to provide the best achievable quality of service guaranteeing graceful degradation for video, audio and sensing applications. The innovative sensor nodes based on above concepts are described in this paper, in relation to the selected scenario of Fire Rescue. The full hardware/software architecture is described and the challenges are discussed.