Cooperative Data Buffering with Mobile Sinks for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Network

This paper discusses a buffering strategy for a delay-tolerant multimedia sensor network (DTMSN), whose typical application is video surveillance. In DTMSN, a sensor node observes events around it and stores the data in its own buffer memory. All the data is collected to the sink. Sensor nodes have restrictions on buffer memory as well as battery capacity. The entire data size is much larger than a single node’s memory size. Thus, developing a strategy for buffering satisfying these restrictions is a critical issue for DTMSN. In this paper, we propose a novel buffering scheme for DTMSN called cooperative buffering (CB). In the proposed CB, the sensor node which has a large amount of data cooperates with its neighbor nodes to buffer the data in a distributed manner. CB uses mobile sinks. The cooperatively buffered data are transmitted directly to the mobile sink when it arrives. After proposing CB, this paper discusses extension for easy collection of the sink, extension for multi source nodes, and some sink mobility strategies of sink mobility. It evaluates the power consumption performance of CB via theoretical formulation and computer simulation. As a result, we show from the results that the proposed CB can handle multimedia data while operating at low-power.