WCCP: A congestion control protocol for wireless multimedia communication in sensor networks

The growing interest in applications of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) imposes new challenges on congestion control protocols in such networks. In this paper, we propose a new content-aware cross layer WMSN Congestion Control Protocol (WCCP) by considering the characteristics of multimedia content. WCCP employs a Source Congestion Avoidance Protocol (SCAP) in the source nodes, and a Receiver Congestion Control Protocol (RCCP) in the intermediate nodes. SCAP uses Group of Picture (GOP) size prediction to detect congestion in the network, and avoids congestion by adjusting the sending rate of source nodes and distribution of the departing packets from the source nodes. In addition, RCCP monitors the queue length of the intermediate nodes to detect congestion in both monitoring and event-driven traffics. Moreover, to improve the received video quality in base stations, WCCP keeps the I-frames and ignores the other less important frame types of compressed video, in the congestion situations. The proposed WCCP protocol is evaluated through simulations based on various performance metrics such as packet loss rate, frame loss rate, Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR), end-to-end delay, throughput, and energy consumption. The results show that WCCP significantly improves the network performance and the quality of received video in the sink nodes, and outperforms the existing state-of-the-art congestion control protocols. 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.