Design and implementation of a QoS-aware MAC protocol for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) have entered the class of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to meet the multimedia requirements of new emerging applications, such as surveillance and telepresence. Combining the traditional scalar sensors used in WSN nodes with tiny cameras and microphones, WMSNs commonly carry heterogeneous traffic with different Quality of Service (QoS) requirements. In order to deliver heterogeneous traffic with different requirements in highly resource constrained sensor networks, QoS provisioning and service differentiation become unavoidable. In this paper first we discuss the QoS-provisioning in sensor networks and evaluate the efficiency of existing QoS-aware MAC protocols. As a result of this evaluation, next we design and implement a QoS-aware MAC protocol for WMSNs, Diff-MAC, which integrates different methods to meet the requirements of QoS provisioning to deliver heterogeneous traffic and provides a fair all-in-one QoS-aware MAC protocol. Diff-MAC aims to increase the utilization of the channel with effective service differentiation mechanisms while providing fair and fast delivery of the data. Performance evaluation results of Diff-MAC, obtained through extensive simulations, show significant improvements, in terms of latency, data delivery and energy efficiency, compared to two other existing protocols. Implementation of Diff-MAC on Imote2 platform also reveals that the protocol with moderate complexity can be easily implemented on the resource