GOP-Based Geographic Routing Scheme in Wireless Sensor Networks

Many applications have been proposed in wireless sensor networks. For example, environmental monitoring, health monitoring, battlefield surveillance, etc. Most of these applications require the sensor nodes to transmit the up-to-date image or video back to the sink node for real-time processing. However, the computational power and energy constraints of the sensor devices greatly limit the possibility of using some traditional streaming approaches to stream the data back to the sink node. In this paper, we proposed a Group of Pictures (GOP) based geographic multipath routing scheme with selective retransmission in wireless sensor networks. In the routing algorithm, each intermediate sensor node will consider the effect of the drop of each frame to the video quality. As a result, the sensor nodes can conserve energy and maintain the predefined acceptable video quality by only selectively retransmit the frames which are more important to the video quality. An extensive simulation has been performed and the results show that our scheme can more evenly distribute the loads to different sensor nodes in the network without sacrificing much in video quality.