Routing impact on Network Lifetime Maximization using Power/Rate trade-off in WVSN

In Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), one of the most important issues is to balance video data coding versus the perceived video quality at the sink, while maximizing the network lifetime. That is, better quality generates higher data rates and consequently consumes additional resources (i.e. energy). Finding such a balance is not obvious, especially in a distributed fashion. Previous research works have tackled this issue by not considering the routing issue; i.e. they consider that it has been done separately during the network initialization. In other term, routing is "viewed" as a network input and not as a parameter to optimize. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate, through extensive simulations, the impact of the routing policy on the approaches used to find such a balance. To this end, we first considered several well-known routing approaches in WMSNs and extensively analyzed the impact of each one by considering three main parameters: battery consumption, activity duration, and network lifetime. The simulation results show clearly the great impact of the considered routing approaches on the obtained resource's consumption balance.