Flooding Zone Control Protocol (FZCP): enhancing the reliability of real-time multimedia delivery in WSNs

The flooding zone initialization protocol (FZIP) was proposed as a mechanism to provide power efficient flooding for real-time multimedia data over wireless sensor networks (WSNs). FZIP can initialize different FZ sizes with different performance levels (i.e. loss rate, latency, and overhead). Increasing the FZ size increases redundancy which in turn reduces packet loss but consumes extra power overhead. However, how to choose a suitable FZ size poses a tradeoff between packet loss rate and power efficiency under different network sizes, densities, and radio channel conditions. The static FZ size estimation under dynamic WSNs´ conditions leads to unnecessary power overhead or fail to deliver good quality resulting in high packet loss rate. In this paper, we propose the flooding zone control protocol (FZCP) to overcome this problem. FZCP monitors the incoming multimedia packets to detect performance deterioration and change the FZ size (increase/decrease) accordingly. Simulation results show that FZCP enhances the flooding performance and delivers and maintains good quality of real-time multimedia sessions with low energy overhead.