—Owing to the availability of low-cost and low-power CMOS cameras, Wireless Video Sensor Networks (WVSN) has recently become a reality. However video encoding is still a costly process for energy and capacity constrained sensor nodes and this urges the vitality of the control over the network lifetime. In this paper we propose a distributed quality-lifetime control algorithm where quality is simply measured by the visual signal quality. In order to formulate the quality-lifetime problem, we consider the Power-Rate-Distortion (P-R-D) model of the video encoder together with the rate control, medium access and routing functions of the underlying communication protocol and formulate it as a Generalized Network Utility Maximization (GNUM) problem. Then we construct the distributed solution based on duality and proximal point methods with necessary convergence analysis. Simulation results support that optimal quality-lifetime control is possible through the distributed algorithm, where th...