QoS Aware Routing Protocol for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have gained the research interest due to the significance of the field of applications and the advances in sensor technology. In areas where catastrophic events occur such as environmental disasters and battle fields, the network infrastructure is lost and there is a high demand to build a network in order to monitor the area and to help in rescue operations. An easy and fast way is to scatter scalar and video sensor nodes in an ad-hoc manner in the area of interest in order to establish a wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN). Video sensor nodes provide better coverage of the area and enhance the interpretation of the monitored phenomenon.

The main challenges faced in WMSNs are Quality of Service (QoS) and energy constraints. Many routing protocols with various routing metrics have been developed for WSNs. However, limited research has been done on WMSN routing protocols and there is room for improvement in this area. Limited research has been done on routing protocol for WMSN deployed in ad-hoc manner that meets QoS requirements and at the same time considers energy efficiency for the purpose of increasing the lifetime of the network. In this thesis, a routing protocol is proposed for WMSN that is energy efficient and QoS-aware. This protocol is developed to improve the end-to-end delay, reliability and energy efficiency through discovering multiple paths from the source node to the sink node. The simulation results shows that proposed protocol improves the QoS parameters to transmit the multimedia contents.