CORA: Cooperative Communication and Optimal Resource Allocation in Multihop Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

The shared medium and multihop nature of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) involving scalar and camera sensor (CS) nodes poses fundamental challenges to the design of an effective scheme, which can offer, reliable packet delivery, and resource allocation across different network flows. These flows are incurred by multiple events occurring concurrently in the monitored region in presence of shadow-fading environment. In this article, we propose a conjunctive cooperative communication and resource allocation scheme, named cooperative communication and optimal resource allocation (CORA), for Quality of Service (QoS) support in WMSNs. To exploit cooperative communication, we propose coalition formation framework (CFF) along with shortest path routing framework. The shortest path routing framework increases the lifetime of the CS nodes by decreasing hop-by-hop energy consumption. CFF partitions the links (consisting of CS nodes) into disjoint coalitions, which help in concurrent hop-by-hop packet transmission by reducing interference between concurrently scheduled links. This, in turn, increases packet delivery ratio (PDR) and throughput with maximum rate allocations to the competing links. We demonstrate the performance of CORA over the benchmark scheme network flow interaction chart (NFIC), with regard to PDR, throughput, and the lifetime of the CS nodes.