Disjointed Multipath Routing for Real-Time Data in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks with sensing and processing abilities of multimedia data have recently emerged as one of the most important technologies for high quality monitoring. The routing scheme for multimedia data is an important research issue addressed in wireless multimedia sensor networks. In this paper, we propose a disjointed multipath routing scheme for real-time data transmission in wireless multimedia sensor networks. The proposed scheme uses a hybrid routing protocol based on Bluetooth and Zigbee in order to overcome the limitation of low bandwidth in conventional sensor networks. The proposed scheme also performs disjointed multipath routing based on competition to alleviate the delay of routing path setup. To show the superiority of our proposed scheme, we compare it with the existing scheme through performance evaluation. Our experimental results show that our proposed scheme reduces the end-to-end delay by about 30% and the routing path setup costs by about 22% over the existing scheme. Our scheme also increases data reception rates by about 690% over the existing scheme on average. 1. Introduction The research on various applications using wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has progressed in the last few years. The sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks basically mount the sensor modules to collect environmental information such as humidity and temperature. In addition, as they have wireless communication modules, a sensor network is constructed and consists of sensor nodes that are connected to each other to collect and transmit sensor readings on the areas of interest to remote areas through multihop communication between nodes [1, 2]. The WSNs have extensive utilization fields from special applications such as observation of safety monitoring and military affair to living applications such as environmental monitoring, modern healthcare, and U-City [3]. The environmental information collected by the sensor nodes depends on the mounted sensor modules on the node. Recently, with the availability of cheap, small and low-powered CMOS cameras, microphones the applications for gathering multimedia contents such as video and sound over WSNs have become more feasible than ever before. Consequently, it enables high-quality environmental monitoring based on multimedia data [4, 5]. As the multimedia data are very large compared to simple scalar data in conventional sensor networks, the network lifetime of the sensor network is significantly reduced due to excessive energy consumption in particular nodes for transmitting the data.