Reliable Image Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks for Smart Grid Applications

With the rapid development of Smart Grids over wireless sensor networks, the reliable image and video transmission has become more imperative and faces many challenges in wireless harsh environment. Transmission of the image data may experience distortions that decrease the quality of the image due to noise, interference and path loss. In this paper, we show the effect of two error correction algorithms (Static and Adaptive RS) in order to increase the perceptual quality of the transmitted images. Here, as Static Reed-Solomon (RS) coding utilizes additional bits to the information transmitted to correct errors at the receiver side. Unlike Static RS, Adaptive RS is a derived version of the Reed-Solomon that sets the error correction codes of the algorithm based on the distance between the nodes adaptively. Performance results obtained from numerous simulations indicate that the Adaptive RS exhibits much better performance results in terms of PSNR, BER, and Throughput than Static RS. It is good candidate for providing application layer perceptual quality requirements for Smart Grid applications.