The University of British Columbia

In this paper, we consider deployment of a wireless mesh network (WMN) to interconnect a video sensor network (VSN) and improve its energy efficiency. We propose a scheduling method for mesh nodes that performs fair scheduling if there is sufficient link capacity, and perform traffic grooming followed by scheduling using a novel constraint relaxation method if link capacity is insufficient. The resulting improvement in energy efficiency of the VSN is evaluated. Results show remarkable savings in power consumption of sensor nodes when a VSN is interconnected with a WMN: energy consumption in the VSN is reduced by approximately 55-79% when the probability that a sensor node can forward traffic to a mesh node is 50%.