Layered Clustering for Solar Powered Wireless Visual Sensor Networks

Visual-based wireless sensor networks have been implemented in several different fields such as environment monitoring, military applications, and robotic applications. Due to the limitation of node's specification, the bandwidth and energy become critical issues for sensor nodes. In this paper, we employ a solar cell recharging model and a layered clustering model to deal with the restrict energy consumption under the consideration of visual quality. The system lifetime can be prolonged by rechargeable solar cell that can be recharged by solar panel in daytime. In addition, we analyze the simulation results of energy consumption and total transmitted packets by changing the aggregation rate and gate energy (GE). With the aggregation rate decreasing, the cluster head in inner layer can support more visual nodes and reserve more bandwidth. The lower GE can reduce the packets loss during the system charging process. The analysis and experiment result obtained in this paper prove that with the combination of layered clustering and solar recharging, the performance of wireless visual sensor network can be enhanced under the consideration of the restrict node's capacity and video distortion.