A Practical Study of Jointly Exploiting Multiple Image Compression Techniques for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, the amount of multimedia traffic generated by the source nodes and relayed throughout the network towards the sink nodes is relatively vary large. As a result, the overall network performance and operational lifetime rely heavily on the efficiency and the complexity of the compression techniques used. However, known compression techniques have either high efficiency or low complexity but not both, which causes an imbalance in the distribution of the available network resources and hence shortens the network lifetime. In this work, a testbed to experimentally evaluate the performance and energy consumption of image compression and transmission was developed. Based on the testbed, the JPEG and JPEG2000 image compression algorithms were simultaneously embedded and evaluated with the purpose of jointly utilizing the features of both algorithms in order to facilitate a balanced tradeoff between the application performance requirements and the current network status. The analysis of the results verified that, in practical implementations of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, using more than one compression technique by the same source node is feasible and has the potential of utilizing the capabilities of each technique based on the given situation.