A Hierarchical Multi-hop Multimedia Routing Protocol for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) play an important role in pervasive and ubiquitous systems. WMSNs promise a wide scope of potential applications in both civilian and military areas, which require visual and audio information such as environmental monitoring, smart parking, traffic control, and other applications for smart cities. The multimedia content in such applications has the potential to enhance the level of collected information, show the real impact of the event and help to detect objects or intruders. However, WMSN applications must assure reliability, scalability, energy-efficiency and quality level (also from the user’s point-of-view) to support the transmission of multimedia content. With this goal in mind, this article outlines a smart Multi-hop hierarchical routing protocol for Efficient VIdeo communication over WMSN (MEVI). MEVI combines an opportunistic scheme for cluster formation with a minimal signaling overhead, a cross-layer solution to select routes based on network conditions and energy issues, and a smart scheme to trigger multimedia transmission according to sensed data. The cluster approach aims to minimize the energy consumption and is suitable for the distribution of multimedia content in WMSNs. Simulation experiments were conducted to show the benefits of MEVI in disseminating video content compared with Low-Energy Adaptive Clustering Hierarchy (LEACH) and Power Efficient Multimedia Routing (PEMuR) in terms of network lifetime and video quality level.