Interference-aware multipath routing protocol for video transmission over ZigBee wireless sensor networks

Abstract

HAL is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. On the other hand, multimedia applications have gained increasing popularity that gives us the opportunity to improve this technology to support video transmission. In limited bandwidth ZigBee networks (250 kbps at 2.4 GHz), how to increase the throughput in constrained environments has become the main challenge. Multi-path becomes a crucial feature in supporting video transmission. Using simultaneous multiple paths provides the bandwidth requirements of multimedia applications. Unfortunately, concurrent transmission creates the problem of inter-path interference mainly due to the broadcast nature of the underlying medium. In this paper, we propose an interference-minimized multipath routing to facilitate MPEG-4 video transmission over ZigBee-based WSNs. This latter is evaluated using comparison with an interfering multipath routing version and the single path routing under different video frame rates. Results show that the proposed interference-aware multipath routing for ZigBee-based WSNs can dramatically reduce the level of interference and thus maximize the overall throughput and improve the received video quality.

A Survey of Energy-Efficient Communication Protocols with QoS Guarantees in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

“…A Zigbee cluster-tree based multipath routing protocol Z-MHTR [48] with interference awareness [49] is studied by Z. Bidai et al Apart from the conventional Zigbee parent-child tree routing (TR) path (path 1 as shown in Figure 9), Z-MHTR allows source nodes to explore other node disjoint paths using non-parent neighbors.The protocol requires the source node to maintain a record of branches that have been used for TR. A source node S begins to build node disjoint paths following three basic scenarios.…”

“…To reduce interference among disjoint paths, the authors proposed an interference level metric in their follow up work [49]. Nodes are required to record their list of interfering neighbors, excluding those on the same path, by overhearing the route discovery messages and data packets which are not intended for them.…”

“…Compared to their single path counterparts, the multipath routing protocols are able to distribute the bulk multimedia data traffic more evenly among sensors and thus improving load balancing and fair energy consumption. However, for the routing protocols to obtain maximum gain from multiple concurrent paths, designs like [49,50] with inter-path interference awareness are favored in order to solve the route coupling problem [126]. Nonetheless, most multipath routing protocols put there emphasize solely on load balancing and energy conservation.…”

“…For example, only AntSensNet and LCMR explicitly considers QoS and/or prioritization and service differentiation while, in fact, QoS should be a necessity of routing in WMSNs. Moreover, none of the multipath protocols consider about the nature of camera sensors in terms of directional sensor coverage and correlation within the multimedia data from neighboring nodes, which are important to reduce data redundancy and to improve quality of multimedia services [49,50,126].…”

On the Feasibility of Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks over IEEE 802.15.5 Mesh Topologies

“…Consequently, it is necessary that each node is aware of its location. Bidai et al [ 22 ] developed another multipath routing scheme for video transmission that combines proactive routing, which provides fast response to events of interest, with reactive routing. In this way, upon the detection of an event, the transmission of data packets to the sink starts immediately and, simultaneously, a route discovery phase begins where new paths to the sink are discovered.…”