A reliable synchronous transport protocol for wireless image sensor networks

Abstract

Recent advances in image sensing hardware have enabled the development of wireless image sensor networks. Similar to generic wireless sensor networks that collect information from surrounding physical environments as scalar variables, wireless image sensor networks can collect data to generate descriptions of interested targets as images or video streams that, in turn, enhance the userpsilas understanding. However, relaying images over wireless image sensor networks with certain QoS requirements is a challenging task due to the characteristics of wireless channels. In this paper, a novel transport protocol for wireless image sensor networks is presented. This protocol aims at the reliable and synchronous transmission of images from multiple sensor nodes to a sync point. The semantics of JPEG stream are exploited in order to improve the performance of the proposed protocol. We have conducted a series of simulation experiments and reported on their results. Our simulation results show that the proposed protocol performs well in error-prone wireless channels even under high packet loss rates.