Special Issue on Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN’12) Workshop

Recent advances in low-cost hardware and in low-power CMOS digital cameras are enabling the development of embedded multimedia wireless sensors that will allow the deployment of low-cost, low-power devices able to transmit multimedia content. These new platforms need the development of new sensor architectures and protocols able to cope with the stringent demands of multimedia data. The 1 st International Workshop on Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks, held in conjunction with the aimed to bring researchers to submit innovative techniques at all protocol stack layers. This special issue brings out an extended and updated version of a selection of 3 out of the 7 papers presented in the Workshop. The authors introduce a cross-layer approach to enhance the video quality level for event-based multi-tier WMSNs. In particular, the paper presents an adaptive cross-layer approach , which includes a Quality of Experience (QoE)-aware FEC mechanism for WMSNs by generating redundant packets, based on frame importance from user's experience. The proposed cross-layer approach provides video distribution with QoE assurance, while achieving energy-efficiency. The second article of this issue is Low-complexity encoding in block-based hybrid video codecs by moving motion estimation to decoder side, by Johannes Karlsson. The author proposes an approach to reduce the encoder complexity for video compression in wireless sensor networks. The idea is to remove the motion estimation from the encoder and perform the motion prediction at the decoder side. In this