Interference-aware multipath routing protocol for video transmission over ZigBee wireless sensor networks

The IEEE 802.15.4/ZigBee technology is emerging as an important wireless sensor networking solution for short and medium range communication due to its numerous advantages. On the other hand, multimedia applications have gained increasing popularity that gives us the opportunity to improve this technology to support video transmission. In limited bandwidth ZigBee networks (250 kbps at 2.4 GHz), how to increase the throughput in constrained environments has become the main challenge. Multi-path becomes a crucial feature in supporting video transmission. Using simultaneous multiple paths provides the bandwidth requirements of multimedia applications. Unfortunately, concurrent transmission creates the problem of inter-path interference mainly due to the broadcast nature of the underlying medium. In this paper, we propose an interference-minimized multipath routing to facilitate MPEG-4 video transmission over ZigBee-based WSNs. This latter is evaluated using comparison with an interfering multipath routing version and the single path routing under different video frame rates. Results show that the proposed interference-aware multipath routing for ZigBee-based WSNs can dramatically reduce the level of interference and thus maximize the overall throughput and improve the received video quality.