Development of IEEE802.15.4 based wireless sensor network platform for image transmission

Abstract

Conventional Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) mainly deals with scalar data such as temperature, humidity, pressure and light which are very suitable for low rate and low power IEEE 802.15.4 based networking technology. The commercial off-theshelf (COTS) CMOS camera has fostered researchers to push WSN a step further. The unique properties of multimedia data delivery pose novel challenges for resource-constrained sensor network. Transmitting raw data is very costly while limited processing power prevents sophisticated multimedia processing. This paper presents the development of a low cost, low power WSN hardware platform named TelG embedded with an operating system called WiseOS, system software, and also a simple best effort JPEG images transmission over the network. The experimental results from the testbed illustrate that the performance of our designed WSN platform are comparable to the existing ones in the market in terms of packet reception rate (PRR) and received signal strength intensity (RSSI) with respect to the distance. It also shows that the end-to-end delay increases proportionally with the number of hops. At an average data rate of 48.38Kbps, we conclude that our platform not only can support real-time multimedia data delivery but also a low voice coding standard such as G.729a (8kbps)