A Study on the Power Consumption of H.264/AVC-Based Video Sensor Network

Abstract

There is an increasing interest in using video sensor networks (VSNs) as an alternative to existing video monitoring/surveillance applications. Due to the limited amount of energy resources available in VSNs, power consumption efficiency is one of the most important design challenges in VSNs. Video encoding contributes to a significant portion of the overall power consumption at the VSN nodes. In this regard, the encoding parameter settings used at each node determine the coding complexity and bitrate of the video. This, in turn, determines the encoding and transmission power consumption of the node and the VSN overall. Therefore, in order to calculate the nodes’ power consumption, we need to be able to estimate the coding complexity and bitrate of the video. In this paper, we modeled the coding complexity and bitrate of the H.264/AVC encoder, based on the encoding parameter settings used. We also propose a method to reduce the model estimation error for videos whose content changes within a specified period of time. We have conducted our experiments using a large video dataset captured from real-life applications in the analysis. Using the proposed model, we show how to estimate the VSN power consumption for a given topology.