Design and implementation of an energy efficient routing system for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Abstract

Increasing technological advancements in wireless networks, low cost and easily deployable sensor nodes as well as miniaturized hardware permits the existence of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), a distributed Ad-hoc network enabling multimedia data transmission such as audio files, streaming videos, and pictures in addition to scalar data. Recently, huge number of applications like battle field monitoring, wildlife monitoring, forest fire detection, environmental monitoring and location based multimedia surveillance are supported by this network. Unlike Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs), the routing process of WMSNS experiences more difficulties as they intend to transmit high volume multimedia data in real time and non real time scenarios. Additionally, the routing mechanism should satisfy the applications specific requirements like energy efficiency, reliability, scalability, and Quality of Service (QoS) support. Inadequate resources and unreliable low-power wireless links affects the QoS of the WMSNs greatly. Energy efficiency and reliability are the two important QoS factors for most of the applications in WMSNs. The design of energy efficient communication protocol is an important responsibility of any routing mechanism to improve the data transmission as well as preserve the available energy of the sensors in a resource constrained network. In this aspect, link quality analysis is an eminent trait to obtain energy efficient reliable multihop routing algorithms in sensor networks. The behavioral study of low-power wireless links help the routing protocol in ensuring reliability and in maintaining correct network operations. Routing protocols that use inappropriate link metrics are prone to failure in forwarding the high volume of multimedia data and are scarce to meet the expected network life time. newline