Power aware communication in wireless pervasive smart camera networks

Visual sensor networks bring together the research domains of smart cameras and wireless sensor networks. Focusing on power consumption and longterm deployments, typical sensor nodes come with limited computing power and low communication performance. A smart camera that performs onboard video analysis and exchanges data with adjacent nodes has higher computation and communication requirements. Therefore, a main challenge in visual sensor networks is to find a tradeoff between performance and power consumption. This work presents a camera prototype equipped with a low- and a high-performance radio allowing to trade communication performance for power consumption by selecting the appropriate device. Radio power consumption is evaluated for different modes of operation and a power model for clusters of dual-radio cameras is presented.