Matching stream authentication and resource allocation to multimedia codec dependency with position-value partitioning in wireless multimedia sensor networks

A cross layer Unequal Error Protection (UEP) scheme based upon the multimedia position-value (P-V) partitioning has been recently proposed to only improve energy-distortion performance in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN). There is also a great potential to adapt this UEP scheme into multimedia stream integrity protection. However, performance gains in multimedia transmissions with considerations of energy, distortion, and authentication in WMSN is a challenge. This difficulty results from the media codec dependency on both the content of multimedia stream authentication and protection on the integrity process itself. In this article, we propose a novel scheme which optimally matches the application layer multimedia codec dependency to both lower layer resource allocation requirements and the upper layer stream authentication. The goal of this scheme is to optimize the integrity and quality performance gain within energy constraint. The contribution of the proposed approach is two folds. Firstly, a stream authentication scheme matched with P-V codec dependency is proposed which significantly reduces additional authentication dependency overhead. Secondly, a new resource allocation scheme is proposed to improve energy-distortion-authentication performance with regard to codec dependency. Simulation studies demonstrate that the proposed scheme significantly impacts achieving multimedia transmission quality with energy efficiency and authentication assurance.