Quantitative Power Consumption Analysis of a Multi-tier Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network

Wireless multimedia sensor networks provide a platform of interconnected devices that are able to ubiquitously retrieve multimedia content. The provided content may include video and audio streams and still images in addition to traditional scalar data such as temperature, humidity or light intensity. In this paper, we implement a video surveillance application on a multi-tier wireless multimedia sensor network. The key contributions of this work are the implementation of the given network architecture on Libelium Waspmote platform and the evaluation of power consumption between single-tier and multi-tier architectures. We report power consumption of the system with respect to different scenarios and states such as video acquisition, processing, and uploading. The results demonstrate that with the selected hardware platform, the total energy consumption of a video surveillance scenario can be halved by using multi-tier compared with a single-tier architecture.