QoS-supported energy-efficient MAC (QEMAC) protocol based on IEEE 802.11e for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

The handiness of low-cost modest and tiny imaging sensors fostered the emergence of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN) applications i.e. traffic congestion avoidance, video surveillance, localization, telemedicine, and industrial process control systems. The above applications require not only guaranteed-support of QoS but also the energy efficient multimedia processing in the WMSN, which necessitates appropriate sensor MAC protocol. Since the need to minimize the energy consumption has driven most of the research in sensor networks so far, mechanisms to efficiently deliver application-level QoS, and to map these requirements to network-layer metrics such as latency and jitter, have not been primary concerns in mainstream research on sensor networks. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient MAC protocol (QEMAC) that caters the Quality of Services for the multimedia heterogeneous environment with fairness feature. QEMAC is based on the latest IEEE 802.11e standard and enhances it for energy-conservation and fairness without violating QoS constraints to the wireless multimedia sensor networks. Simulation results reveal that QEMAC provide fairness and suffer low delay and jitter with efficient energy consumption as compare to the other QoS-aware sensory MAC protocols.