A Software-Defined Surveillance System With Energy Harvesting: Design and Performance Optimization

Even though energy harvesting is a promising technology for energy-efficient surveillance systems, energy harvesting levels are highly dynamic depending on the time and location. Thus, the deployment of nonenergy-harvesting sensor nodes (NHSs) and sophisticated sleep scheduling of sensor nodes are necessary for performance guaranteed surveillance systems. In this paper, we present a software-defined surveillance system (SDSS) in which a centralized controller determines the sleep schedules of energy harvesting and NHSs on the basis of the collected information such as the spatial distribution of targets and the energy levels of sensor nodes. To derive the optimal sleep schedules minimizing the number of active sensor nodes while providing sufficient surveillance performance, a constraint Markov decision process problem is formulated and the optimal policy on sleep scheduling is obtained by linear programming. The evaluation results demonstrate that the SDSS with the optimal policy can reduce energy consumption by employing fewer active sensor nodes while providing the required level of target monitoring probability.