Delay-constrained high throughput protocol for multi-path transmission over wireless multimedia sensor networks

Real-time multimedia transport has stringent QoS requirements, such as bandwidth, delay, jitter, and loss ratio. Wireless sensor networks are useful for streaming multimedia data in infrastructure-free and hazardous environments. However, these networks are composed of nodes with constrained bandwidth and energy. In QoS routing for wired networks, multipath routing is widely used. Some existing ad hoc routing algorithms also provide multipath routing. Directed diffusion has been commonly used for wireless sensor networks because of its energy efficiency and scalability. However, the basic protocol only routes packets through a single path, which barely meets the throughput requirement of multimedia data. Instead, we propose a multipath algorithm based on directed diffusion that reinforces multiple routes with high link quality and low latency. We use the NS-2 simulation tool with video trace generated by multiple description coding (MDC) to evaluate the performance. The results show that our algorithm gives better throughput and delay performance than standard directed diffusion.