An Energy-Efficient and High-Quality MAC Protocol for Image Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless image sensor networks are widely used in many applications nowadays. Designing a fast and reliable protocol to transmit images over these sensor nodes is the most important feature in these types of networks. In order to do that, it should be considered to image transmission using a proper MAC protocol. In this paper we have proposed a system which consists of image transmission part and new MAC protocol: at the image transmission part, we have proposed a DCT block based image compression using adaptive priority to categorize network packets; the corresponding MAC protocol is a collision free and energy efficient one which works properly with specified image transmission part. In this system, to increase the transmission rate and decrease the energy consumed in retransmission tries, the UDP protocol is used in sending image data packets. We have simulated our system and the experimental results showed the high PSNR of transmitted images with low energy consuming. The results showed better performance than well know methods such as B-MAC protocol.