Quality of service aware routing protocols in wireless multimedia sensor networks: survey

Abstract

Improvements in nanotechnology have introduced contemporary sensory devices that are capable of gathering multimedia data in form of images, audio and video. Wireless multimedia sensor networks handles such type of heterogeneous traffic. Since these networks are an emergent of wireless sensor networks, they inherit constraints that exist in these traditional networks. This paper is a survey of characteristics and requirements of wireless multimedia sensor networks and approaches to mitigating existing challenges in these networks. Further presents a review of recent research on multipath routing protocols and multi-channel media access protocols that offer quality of service assurances in handling multimedia data. The survey shows that there still exist bottlenecks in current routing solutions when applied to wireless multimedia sensor networks due to the nature of traffic involved as well as inherent characteristics, requirements and constraints. The findings are useful in the discovery of solutions to the challenges and issues. The authors further suggest approaches and plausible solutions to the problems in order to assist in the development of protocols that achieve quality of service in wireless multimedia sensor networks.