Energy Aware and Adaptive Cross-Layer Scheme for Video Transmission Over Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), is an ad hoc network of wirelessly connected sensor nodes that allow retrieving video and audio streams, still images, and scalar sensor data but such sensors are limited in energy, memory, communication, and computational power. Multimedia transmission over wireless sensor network (WSN) is a challenging task due to quality-of-service(QoS) guarantees such as huge amount of bandwidth, strict delay, and lower loss ratio. Recently, cross-layer approach adopted by WMSNs shows a promising approach that improves quality of multimedia transmitted over WSNs under different wireless conditions. In this paper, an energy aware and adaptive cross layer scheme to transmit multimedia content over WSNs is presented. It provides packet, queue, and path scheduling, so that it selects optimal video encoding parameters at application layer according to current wireless channel state, and schedules packets according to its type through an adaptive priority video queue so that less important packets are dropped in case of network congestion. Finally, path scheduling is introduced so that different packets types/priority are routed through different paths with different QoSs considering network lifetime. Simulation results show that new scheme transmits video over WSNs efficiently and meets QoS requirements and uses energy wisely to prolongs network lifetime.