Design and Experiment Analysis of a Hadoop-Based Video Transcoding System for Next-Generation Wireless Sensor Networks

The next-generation wireless sensor network (WSN) has the capability of carrying hundreds of high-definition video streams, beside the feature of massive employment of energy-efficient nodes. However, several challenges are identified with respect to the video bearing, such as the different video formats, enormous size of “raw” video, and compatibility with heterogeneous terminal devices. The video transcoding system (VTS) is widely believed to address these challenges. This paper introduces a cloud-based, more specifically, Hadoop-based, video transcoding system to fulfill the vision of bearing hundreds of HD video streams in the next generation WSN, with a discussion on optimization of several significant parameters. This paper obtains three remarkable results: (1) there is an optimal value of the number of Mappers; (2) the optimal value is closely related to the file size; (3) the transcoding time depends principally on the duration of video files rather than their sizes.