Video Coding and Routing in Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Video represents a form of data that needs large storage space. In addition, and due to the complexity of video coding (encoding/decoding) techniques, they usually involve computationally intensive operations. This imposes heavy burdens upon sending and receiving entities that are required to have high processing power and abundant storage capacity, as well as the network infrastructure transporting video content that is required to have sufficient transmission bandwidth. Therefore, it is important to tailor video coding techniques to resource-constrained wireless sensors. Moreover, the intensive computations needed by video codecs consume substantial power, which is a scarce resource of wireless sensor nodes as they are usually battery powered. Therefore, it is of paramount importance to design power-aware coding, streaming, and routing schemes for the emerging wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs), that also achieve high levels of QoS and QoE. This paper introduces a brief survey of the recently published research on some important topics about WVSNs including video coding and routing and point to possible venues for future research.