Utility-based scheduling algorithm for wireless multi-media sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have been widely deployed in monitoring and surveillance areas. With the improvement of sensor nodes´ processing capability, multi-media transmission in WSNs has become a new trend. Since multi-media has strict Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, which calls for efficient scheduling algorithm that could guarantee the end-to-end delay and reduce the energy consumption. Therefore, in this paper we propose a utility-based scheduling algorithm that could enhance the energy efficiency and meet the QoS requirements of multimedia. Our proposed scheduling algorithm includes two steps: firstly, a semi-Markov model is deployed to predict the arrival rate of multi-media; secondly, a utility function is designed which based on the consideration of energy consumption and the QoS constraints. Simulations show that, compared to conventional algorithms, our proposed scheduling algorithm performs better in terms of packet loss rate due to buffer overflow and end-to-end delay.