Streaming Multimedia over WMSNs: An Online Routing Protocol

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are generally used for surveillance applications, intrusion detection, environmental and building monitoring, etc. Routing has become an important challenge to WMSNs from the standpoint of supporting multimedia applications due to the constraints on energy and computational capabilities of sensor nodes, and acquiring of the global network knowledge for disseminating to nodes packets forwarding purposesμ. In this paper, we propose an online multipath routing protocol for use in WMSNs. The proposed protocol uses sensor nodes‟ positions to make packet-forwarding decisions at each hop. These decisions are made in real-time, in such a way that there is no need for having the knowledge about the entire network topology. This new routing protocol achieves load-balancing of traffic and minimizes energy consumption among nodes by using: (1) smart greedy forwarding scheme based on adaptive compass for selecting the most appropriate next hop for forwarding the traffic and (2) walking back forwarding scheme to bypass network holes. Performance comparison of the proposed protocol with Two-Phase Geographical Greedy Forwarding (TPGF) and Greedy Perimeter Stateless Routing (GPSR) shows that they: (a) maximize the overall network lifespan by not draining energy from some specific nodes, (b) provide quality of service delivery for video streams by influencing the best node along the route to destination, and (c) scale better in densely deployed wireless sensors network.