Traffic-aware congestion control (TACC) for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) have emerged as a revolutionary technology, that has shifted the focus of low power wireless sensor networks (WSNs). These networks are aimed at gathering and delivering both scalar and multimedia data from the environment. WMSNs inherit the miniature size, low power, low processing and short range wireless communication traits from WSNs. Addition of multimedia content in WMSNs demands fulfillment of various QoS parameters like low end-to-end delay, acceptable jitter rate, low packet loss rate and higher throughput. Over the past few years, considerable research efforts have been directed towards the fulfillment of these QoS requirements; by proposing new traffic-aware medium access and routing algorithms. However, the issues of rate adaptation and congestion control are still largely unexplored. Congestion in wireless networks is a major cause of packet loss resulting in degraded network performance. In WMSNs congestion is a common occurrence, due to the communication of high data rate, bursty video traffic over lossy wireless link. Therefore, it is critical to adjust the sending rate of source nodes based on network conditions. This work investigates the issue of rate adaptation and congestion control in WMSNs. A traffic-aware congestion control protocol (TACC) is proposed that operates on end-to-end principle at the transport layer. The proposed protocol uses burst loss information to detect congestion at the destination and directs source nodes to adjust reporting rate accordingly. The proposed protocol is evaluated using simulation analysis which shows significant improvement in terms of packet losses, end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and received picture quality.