A new queuing management mechanism for congestion performance improvement in wireless multimedia sensor networks

Wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) consists of sensor nodes which each node is equipped with different sensors for gathering different kinds of data. Due to burst traffic in WMSNs, the probability of congestion occurrence increases. Congestion can cause low energy efficiency, packet loss, long delay and unfair received data at sink. Therefore, providing mechanisms against performance degradation in congestion situation is necessary. The provided information by sensors may have different importance. Some real-time applications may need to send their data toward the sink with low latency and high reliability. Hence, there is a need to service differentiation between real-time and non real-time traffic. To prevent performance degradation in congestion situation, we present a new queuing management mechanism for WMSN nodes. We distinguish between real-time and non real-time traffics and use two separate priority queues with different weight for each of them. The priority of each packet in the queue is based on its experienced traffic load in the traversed path. Simulation results confirm that our proposed mechanism has superior performance in comparison with existing popular scheduling algorithms such as FIFO in terms of fairness, end-to-end delay, throughput and jitter.