Multimedia streaming in large-scale sensor networks with mobile swarms

Abstract

Sensor networking technologies have developed very rapidly in the last ten years. In many situations, high quality multimedia streams may be required for providing detailed information of the hot spots in a large scale network. With the limited capabilities of sensor node and sensor network, it is very difficult to support multimedia streams in current sensor network structure. In this paper, we propose to enhance the sensor network by deploying limited number of mobile "swarms". The swarm nodes have much higher capabilities than the sensor nodes in terms of both hardware functionalities and networking capabilities. The mobile swarms can be directed to the hot spots in the sensor network to provide detailed information of the intended area. With the help of mobile swarms, high quality of multimedia streams can be supported in the large scale sensor network without too much cost. The wireless backbone network for connecting different swarms and the routing schemes for supporting such a unified architecture is also discussed and verified via simulations.