Jitter Detection for Synchronization Control in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Collaborative in-network processing operations in Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) often require effective synchronization control. Extensive researches in the traditional networks mainly focus on the synchronization control with the buffer management in the receiver. However, for WMSNs, the chaotic transport channel and low bandwidth introduce serious jitter. Jitter degrades the timing relationship among packets in a single media stream and between packets from different media streams and, hence, creates multimedia synchronization problems. Moreover, too much jitter will also degrade the performance of the streaming buffer. By only employing the buffer management scheme in the receiver, we can hardly satisfy the synchronization requirement of the in-network processing. In this study, we propose an active jitter detection mechanism for the synchronization control in WMSNs. This mechanism will improve the quality of service in multimedia networking by discarding the jitter-corrupted packets immediately and balancing the delay and jitter actively. We implement the proposed scheme in the practical WMSNs platform. The experiment results show that our scheme can reduce the average packet jitter effectively and improve the synchronization controlling performance significantly.