A fuzzy-based approach for energy-efficient Wi-Fi communications in dense wireless multimedia sensor networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks can provide valuable information for many monitoring and control applications, which can process scalar data, still images, audio and video streams. However, multimedia streaming is still very challenging for those networks, since energy constraints limit the attainable bandwidth for data packet transmissions. In some cases, dense sensor networks may have many source nodes streaming at the same time and such transmission demand may not be supported by the network protocols and defined links. Actually, for networks based on IEEE 802.15.4 protocol, multimedia streaming may be unfeasible for many scenarios, even with small numbers of sensors, severely restricting the deployment of multimedia sensor nodes. However, other standards as IEEE 802.11 could provide acceptable bandwidth for multimedia streaming, although energy efficiency is not a major concern for it. In this context, this paper proposes an energy-efficient approach that provides high bandwidth with optimized energy consumption, directly benefiting wireless multimedia sensor networks. A fuzzy-based solution is defined to determine whether Wi-Fi access points should be switched off when they are underutilized, reducing energy consumption while keeping network performance at acceptable levels.