Performance Analysis of Selected Error Control Protocols in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Error control is an important mechanism for providing robust multimedia communication in wireless sensor networks. Although there have been several research works in analysis of error control mechanisms in wireless multimedia networks and wireless sensor networks, but none of them are directly applicable to the wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) which has resource and performance constraints of WSNs as well as QoS requirements of multimedia communications. In this paper, we comprehensively evaluate the performance of several error control mechanisms in WMSNs. The results of our analysis provide an extensive comparison between automatic repeat request (ARQ), forward error correction (FEC), and hybrid FEC/ARQ error control mechanisms in terms of frame loss rate, frame peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), and energy efficiency.