Differentiated services architecture for QoS provisioning in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

In this paper, a Differentiated Services (DiffServ) architecture for Quality of Service (QoS) provisioning in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) is presented. The proposed architecture differentiates critical real-time data from real-time multimedia data by defining six traffic classes along with their forwarding behaviour. Since Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) are application-specific, DiffServ for WMSNs approaches bandwidth allocation as an optimization problem. The goal is to assign bandwidth to different traffic classes in order to maximize the utilization of the whole system (subject to the overall system constraints). The proposed architecture is evaluated under different forwarding paradigms such as single-hop, multi-hop, and cluster-based. Analytical results show that DiffServ for WMSN can provide service differentiation w.r.t. the characteristics and bandwidth requirement of the traffic class.