In Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) the lifetime of battery-operated visual nodes is limited by their energy consumption, which is proportional to the energy required for sensing, processing, and transmitting the data. Given the large amount of data generated by the visual nodes, both processing and transmitting image data are quite costly in terms of energy in comparison with other types of sensor networks. Therefore, energy efficiency is a main concern in WMSNs. In this paper an energy efficient collaborative mechanism for environment surveillance is proposed. The proposed scheme employs a mixed random deployment of acoustic and visual sensor nodes. Acoustic sensors detect and localize the occurred event/object(s) in a duty-cycled manner by sampling the received signals and then trigger the visual sensor nodes covering the objects to monitor them. Hence, visual sensors are warily scheduled to be awakened just for monitoring the object(s) detected in their domain, otherwise they save their energy.

Peer Reviewed