Enhanced S-MAC Protocol for Early Reaction and Detection in Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) continue their ascending developement to be among the leaders of technology. Furthermore, images are of paramount importance in several applications based on WSNs. Capturing, processing and transmitting the image face several challenges, mainly because of their highly needed power consumption. The huge number of images sensed and transmitted in a Wireless Video Sensor Network (WVSN) increases the dataflow on the overall network. A WVSN consists of three different layers: the video-sensor node, the coordinator and the sink. Sending images at the same time from different sensor nodes to a coordinator causes several problems. Besides energy consumption and bandwidth usage that represent the two major challenges in WSN, the queue of images on the coordinator can cause slower detection of intrusions and thus slower reaction from the coordinator. These reasons increase the need of a mac-layer protocol to control the network. We propose a new modified communication protocol based on the S-MAC protocol. This solution consists of adding a priority bit to the S-MAC protocol. Our approach is validated by experimentation using raspberry pi 3 and by simulation in OMNET++.