Distributed online visual sensor network reconfiguration for resource-aware coverage and task assignment

A visual sensor network (VSN) consists of resource-limited camera nodes which process the captured image data locally and collaborate with other cameras over a wireless network. The configuration of the network is a very important task in VSNs in order to adapt the available resources to the current requirements of the application. We focus on coverage and task assignment as a key configuration problem for VSNs. Due to rapid changes in the VSN's environment, a dynamic and online reconfiguration is highly needed. In this paper we introduce and evaluate a fast and distributed resource-aware reconfiguration algorithm. Our approach is based on simple optimization primitives to find good approximations and to keep the required data transfer in the VSN small. We analyze the communication complexity and compare our algorithm with a centralized configuration approach based on several scenarios with different complexity. Our experiments show that we can achieve the same configuration quality as with the centralized approach in almost all cases.