Analyzing lifetime of energy harvesting wireless multimedia sensor nodes in industrial environments

Abstract

Recently, there has been a great demand for multimedia communication using Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) in industrial environments thanks to their low cost, flexibility, and rapid deployment. However, WMSNs face a major challenge of limited lifetime due to their limited battery capacity. Compared to regular data transmission, multimedia data transmission causes higher energy consumption because of larger data sizes leading to faster depletion of sensor node's batteries. The objective of this paper is to analytically quantify the impact of different energy harvesting methods based on vibration, indoor solar, and temperature difference as well as Fast-Zonal DCT and BinDCT based image compression methods on the lifetime of Telos and Mica2 sensor nodes deployed in indoor industrial environment. Performance results show that energy harvesting and image compression techniques improve lifetime of Mica2 and Telos motes by 51.8% and 25.8%, respectively when used with proper power management methods.