A multimedia quality-driven network resource management architecture for wireless sensor networks with stream authentication

Media integrity, transmission quality, and energy efficiency are critical for secure wireless image streaming in a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN). However, conventional data authentication and resource allocation schemes cannot be applied directly to WMSN due to the constraints on limited energy and computing resources. In this paper, we propose a quality-driven scheme to optimize stream authentication and unequal error protection (UEP) jointly. This scheme can provide digital image authentication, image transmission quality optimization, and high energy efficiency for WMSN. The contribution of this research is two-fold as summarized below. First, a new resource allocation-aware greedy stream authentication approach is proposed to simplify the authentication process. Second, an authentication-aware wireless network resource allocation scheme is developed to reduce image distortion and energy consumption in transmission. The scheme is studied by unequally protected image packets with the consideration of coding and authentication dependency. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a performance gain of 3 ∼ 5dB in terms of authenticated image distortion.