A Robust and Energy-Efficient Approach for Image/Video Dissemination in WSNs

Minimizing energy consumption is an important challenge in wireless sensor networks. The proposal of reactive on-demand philosophy where routes are established only when required is a major step. But it still needs to keep information about routes. The constantly changing topology, however, makes the routing state upkeep difficult. Thus multi-path routing is usually used for robust data delivery. But it is inefficient in terms of energy and bandwidth consumption especially for the slightly larger data packets such as in image/video dissemination. In this paper, we present a gradient-based routing protocol which works without knowledge of the existence of any neighboring nodes hence manifests the property of robust performance and eliminates the latency as well as the overhead of state upkeep. The data forwarding is based on the gradient -a cost field which provides each sensor node the minimum energy cost path to forward sensing data hence the energy consumption is further improved. Simulation studies show that our protocol is more energy-efficient than comparable work like GRAB and is as robust as its multi-path delivery.