Secure Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks: a Survey

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are used in many application domains, such as surveillance systems, telemedicine and so on. In order to ensure a broad deployment of such innovative services, strict requirements on security, privacy, and distributed processing of multimedia contents should be satisfied, taking also into account the limited technological resources (in term of energy, computation, bandwidth, and storage) of sensor nodes. Thus, with respect to classic Wireless Sensor Networks, the achievement of these goals is more challenging due to the presence of multimedia data, which usually requires complex compression and aggregation algorithms. In order to provide a unifying synthesis on the last achievements, this survey summarizes the main findings on secure WMSNs proposed in the literature and forecasts future perspectives of such a technology.