Meerkats: A Power-Aware, Self-Managing Wireless Camera Network for Wide Area Monitoring
Cíntia Borges Margi, Xiaoye Lu, G. Zhang, G. Stanek, Roberto Manduchi, Katia Obraczka · 2006
We introduce Meerkats, a wireless network of batteryoperated camera nodes that can be used for monitoring and surveillance of wide areas. One distinguishing feature of Meerkats (when compared, for example, with systems like Cyclops [10]) is that our nodes are equipped with sufficient processing and storage capabilities to be able to run relatively sophisticated vision algorithms (e.g., motion estimation) locally and/or collaboratively. In previous work [9, 8, 7] we analyzed the energy consumption characteristics of the Meerkats nodes under different duty cycles, involving different power states of the system’s components. In this paper we present an analysis of the performance of the surveillance system as a function of the image acquisition rate and of the synchronization between cameras nodes. Our ultimate goal is to optimally balance the trade-off between application-specific performance requirements (e.g., event miss rate) and network lifetime (as a function of the energy consumption characteristics of each node). 1