Design of a QoS-Aware Routing Mechanism for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, majority of routing protocols considered energy efficiency as the main objective and assumed data traffic with unconstrained delivery requirements. However, the introduction of image and video sensors demands certain quality of service (QoS) from the routing protocols and underlying networks. Managing real-time data requires both energy efficiency and QoS assurance in order to ensure efficient usage of sensor resources and correctness of the collected information. In this paper, we present a novel QoS-aware routing protocol to support high data rate for wireless multimedia sensor networks. Being multi-channel multi-path the foundation, the routing decision is made according to the dynamic adjustment of the required bandwidth and path-length-based proportional delay differentiation for real-time data. The proposed protocol works in a distributed manner to ensure bandwidth and end- to-end delay requirements of real-time data. At the same time, the throughput of non-real-time data is maximized by adjusting the service rate of real-time and non-real-time data. Results evaluated in simulation demonstrate a significant performance improvement in terms of average delay, average lifetime and network throughput.