On transmission efficiency of the multimedia service over IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks

Multimedia services over resource constrained Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) face a performance bottleneck issue from the gateway node to the sink node. Therefore, the queue management at the gateway node is crucial for diversified messages conveyed from the front nodes to the sink node. In this study, we focus on the performance improvement upon different traffic loads over WSNs. A dynamic adaptation scheme based on adjusting Beacon Interval (BI) and Superframe Duration (SD) in the IEEE 802.15.4 MAC superframe accompanied with RED (Random Early Detection) queue management scheme is proposed to increase the transmission efficiency of multimedia over WSNs. Evaluation metrics include end-to-end delay, packet delivery ratio and energy consumption in IEEE 802.15.4 beacon enabled and non-beacon enabled mode. Simulation results show that RED scheme accompanied with an appropriate setting of BO, SO value can effectively decrease end-to-end delay and energy consumption compared to the DropTail (FIFO) scheme.