Congestion-aware multi-gateway routing for wireless mesh video surveillance networks

In video surveillance and monitoring systems based on wireless mesh networks, large volumes of multimedia data with different priorities and time demands are generated by video cameras and wireless sensors. Hence, one of the key issues is how to alleviate network congestion for highly reliable transfer of multimedia data towards gateways. This paper proposes a solution for utilizing multiple gateways to divert data streams and alleviate traffic congestion near a specific gateway. With a new routing protocol, named “Multi-Gateway Routing with Congestion Avoidance (MGR-CA)”, network congestion can be predicted in a distributed manner and amounts of data traffic transmitted to the congested path are redirected to an alternative gateway based on the severity of congestion. Preliminary testbed experiments are made to show the performance of our scheme.