Coordinated Distributed Power Management with Video Sensor Networks: Analysis, Simulation, and Prototyping

In this paper, we explore various design issues for coordinated distributed power management (CDPM) policies in wireless video sensor networks (VSNs). These CDPM policies help to efficiently power manage such networks while benefiting from the advantages gained by using distributed techniques. The design issues we explore include power management under dynamic and adaptive timeout thresholds, two-hop broadcast information dissemination, hybrid CDPM, and remote wakeup. Our investigations use an advanced, event-triggered VSN simulator, as well as a set of VSN prototype nodes we built as a proof-of-concept. Our prototype network includes four digital signal processing (DSP)-based wireless video nodes which form a small multi-hop network. Last but not least, we propose a novel analytical approach to predict the CDPM policy performance, and show that this analytical method matches the measured power savings in the prototype.