Performance Comparison of Error Compensation Techniques with Multipath Transmission in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Due to the proliferation of the multimedia applications over unreliable medium like wireless networks, robust image and video communication have become more important. In this paper, we consider the transmission distortions on the multimedia data due to both channel impairments and instant node failures for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN). Two techniques are investigated to compensate the multimedia distortions at the expense of incurring additional delays and/or wasting bandwidth resources. First technique is an error concealment technique utilizing discrete wavelet transform for embedding downsized replicas of original image into itself, thereby mitigating degradations in a backward-compatible scheme. The other is Reed­Solomon coding utilizing additional information bits to correct bit/symbol errors. Two techniques are also integrated with multipath transmission to provide fault tolerance. Performance results show that error concealment with multipath transmission technique (ECMF) is more promising to compensate for losses due to unreliable channels and instant node failures than Reed-Solomon coding with multipath transmission technique (RSMF) in WMSN. Keywords--Wireless multimedia sensor networks, error concealment, digital watermarking, channel impairments, ReedSolomon coding, multipath transmission.