A QoS-Based Wireless Multimedia Sensor Cluster Protocol

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) provide a wireless network infrastructure for sensed data transport in environments where wired or satellite technologies cannot be used. Because the embedded hardware of the sensor nodes has been improved very much in the last years and the number of real deployments is increasing considerably, they have become a reliable option for the transmission of any type of sensed data, from few sensed measures to multimedia data. This paper proposes a new protocol that uses an ad hoc cluster based architecture which is able to adapt the logical sensor network topology to the delivered multimedia stream features, guaranteeing the quality of the communications. The proposed protocol uses the quality of service (QoS) parameters, such as bandwidth, delay, jitter, and packet loss, of each type of multimedia stream as a basis for the sensor clusters creation and organization inside the WSN, providing end-to-end QoS for each multimedia stream. We present real experiments that show the performance of the protocol for several video and audio cases when it is running.