Cross-Layer Design for QoS Support in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

The rapid growth in micro-electronics technology and research in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has made it possible to realize multimedia delivery on wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs), consisting of tiny sensing devices. The volume and characteristics of multimedia data produced by WMSNs is quite different from the scalar data generated by conventional WSNs. This has raised the need to explore efficient routing protocols for multimedia data delivery in WMSNs, particularly supporting stringent quality of service (QoS). In this paper, we propose a novel cross-layer framework for QoS support in WMSNs, which optimizes the functionalities of communication protocols to maximize the number of video stream requests to be delivered while the imposed distortion constraint on the streams are met. QoS requirements are mapped on joint operations of application, network, MAC and link layers of the underlying communication framework. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed framework achieves its objective efficiently.