Elsevier

Ad Hoc Networks

Volume 19, August 2014, Pages 132-141
Ad Hoc Networks

Comparison of QoS-aware single-path vs. multi-path routing protocols for image transmission in wireless multimedia sensor networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.adhoc.2014.02.008Get rights and content

Abstract

Wireless multimedia sensor network (WMSN) applications require strong multimedia communication competence. Therefore, in WMSN applications, it is necessary to use specific mechanisms in order to handle multimedia communication challenges and address desired energy efficiency and reliability goals. Nevertheless, the existing communication protocols are not suitable for the communication challenges and the desired goals. In this respect, specific mechanisms for prioritization, link-quality estimation and multi-path selection can be employed by quality of service (QoS)-aware routing protocols to meet the reliability and delay requirements of WMSN applications.

In this study a novel approach is proposed to set different reliability values for image packets for image transmission in WMSNs. Using this prioritization, important parts of an image are assigned high priority and take priority during data transmission. In order to evaluate the proposed approach, the performance of single-path and multi-path QoS-aware routing protocols has been investigated for WMSN-based image transmission applications. Specifically, comparative performance analysis of single-path routing and multi-path routing in image transmission have been conducted in terms of peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), average delay, reachability, and control overhead. As proven by the results of the performance evaluations in this study, multi-path routing is better than single-path routing in terms of reliability. On the other hand, at high traffic loads, multi-path routing may perform worse in terms of delay due to its associated overhead.

Introduction

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) is a new major research topic in academia as a result of the expectations of multimedia data producing wireless sensor nodes such as higher bandwidth demands, higher energy usage, and strict quality of service (QoS) requirements. The applications of WMSNs are used in many different areas, including surveillance and target tracking, advanced healthcare systems, industrial process control systems and intelligent traffic control [1].

In order to meet the QoS requirements of multimedia traffic, many WMSN applications need custom wireless sensor network (WSN) solutions. Most of the research efforts in WSNs have been motivated by the need for reducing energy consumption. However, both reliability and communication delay requirements of WMSNs have not been the main concern of WSNs. Therefore, QoS-aware routing solutions are needed to meet application-specific requirements of WMSNs. The analysis and design of a solution for image transmission in WMSNs are the main issues addressed in this paper. The major communication challenges for realization of QoS-aware routing in WMSNs can be outlined as follows:

  • Energy consumption: Since multimedia applications may produce high volumes of data, energy consumption is more critical compared to traditional WSNs.

  • Application-specific QoS requirements: Multimedia applications may have different requirements with respect to delay, reliability, and energy efficiency, which necessitate efficient routing solutions addressing diverse QoS requirements.

  • Resource constraints: WMSNs are restricted by energy usage, memory and processing power because of their typical characteristics. Generally, limited node resources result in decreased QoS-awareness in WSNs and cause challenging problems [2], [3]. Thus, routing solutions for WMSNs need to satisfy application-specific QoS requirements using these limited resources [4].

  • Variable link capacity and packet errors: Characteristics of wireless link quality changes over time and space, hence high bit error rates are observed in communication. Therefore, capacity and delay vary frequently and this makes QoS a challenging task [4].

  • Dynamic network connectivity and topologies: In WMSNs, distribution of sensor in the network and their connectivity may change over time due to link failures and sensor failures. Hence, to balance the trade-offs among available energy resources, reliability and latency requirements, adaptive communication protocols are required [4].

To address the abovementioned challenges, a novel approach is proposed for image transmission over WMSNs. By assigning different priority values to different parts of an image, high priority and accordingly high reliability are provided to high-priority data traffic. To realize this, data packets of an image file is divided into two classes and in this way different reliability values are set for each class. Different from the well-known routing protocol MMSPEED [5] which uses multiple speed layers to satisfy deadline requirements, the proposed approach uses a single speed layer to perform differentiation totally in reliability domain. By reducing total quality of an image without losing its important parts, energy consumption, resulting from redundant paths, is reduced.

To prove the efficiency of the proposed approach, the performances of QoS-aware single-path routing and multi-path routing protocols have been investigated for image transmission in WMSNs. The evaluated routing protocols offer three main functionalities, i.e. link-quality estimation, multi-path selection and prioritization, to meet reliability and delay requirements of image transmission applications, Comparative performance evaluations in terms of PSNR, average delay, reachability, and data and control packet overhead have been carried out in order to prove the efficiency of the evaluated routing protocols for image transmission. Although the results of the performance evaluations prove that multi-path routing is more reliable than single-path routing, multi-path routing performs worse than single-path routing in terms of average delay when network traffic load is high due to its associated overhead. Two main contributions of this study can be summarized as follows.

  • Comparative performance evaluations of single-path and multi-path routing approaches for image transmission have been conducted in order to compare important QoS metrics, such as PSNR, average delay, reachability, and data and control packet overhead.

  • The use of image prioritization for WMSN-based image transmission applications is proposed both to address energy efficiency requirement and to provide high reliability. In this regard, WMSN-based image transmission has been argued along with image prioritization from the point of reliability and communication delay.

The remainder of this paper is organized as follows. Section 2 presents a detailed review of single-path and multi-path routing protocols that can be used for WMSN-based image transmission. Section 3 explains performance metrics used in this study and presents simulation results. Section 4 highlights open research issues. Finally, the paper is concluded in Section 5.

Section snippets

Related work

In multi-hop networks, paths between source nodes and the sink can be determined by using hop count, a typical metric. However, in multi-hop wireless sensor networks, radio interference, antenna shape and orientation, distance and environmental factors may vary during the lifetime of a wireless sensor network and all of them affect link quality between pairs of sensor nodes. Although the locations of nodes in the network are fixed and every node is configured with the same transmit power,

Performance metrics and results

This section mainly focuses on performance evaluations of single-path and multi-path routing protocols. For the performance evaluations, MMSPEED has been preferred due to its ability to use many flows for differentiation on reliability and timeliness domain. Different from MMSPEED, the proposed approach uses only one flow and tries to differentiate one flow in reliability domain, i.e., instead of sending many images with different reliabilities, an image is divided into two different packet

Open research issues

Although, the existing single-path routing and multi-path routing approaches evaluated in this study can be employed in WMSN applications, a number of key issues still need to be explored. They are briefly summarized as follows.

  • Use of Efficient Image Formats for WMSNs: Existing lossy and lossless image formats were designed for conventional PC-based applications. Considering possible packet errors and variable capacity of WMSN links, novel prioritization-based image formats with

Conclusions

Though WMSNs are attracting significant attention and their applications are increasing, specific techniques must be employed to meet associated QoS requirements of multimedia traffic and handle limited resources of WMSN nodes properly. In this study, a novel approach is proposed for image transmission in WMSNs. Using a set of different reliability values for image packets, a prioritization is realized and important parts of an image are assigned high priority. In this way, the important parts

Muhammet Macit received the B.S degree in Computer Engineering from Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2010 and the M.S degree in Computer Engineering from Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2012. He is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer and at the same time pursuing to his Ph.D degree in Computer Engineering from Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey. His current research interests include wireless sensor networks, fraud detection and scalable distributed software

References (25)

  • N. Saxena et al.

    Dynamic duty cycle and adaptive contention window based QoS-MAC protocol for wireless multimedia sensor networks

    Comput. Netw.

    (2008)
  • M. Chen et al.

    Directional geographical routing for real-time video communications in wireless sensor networks

    Comput. Commun.

    (2007)
  • I.F. Akyildiz et al.

    Wireless multimedia sensor networks: a survey

    IEEE Wirel. Commun.

    (2007)
  • F. Stann, J. Heidemann, RMST: reliable data transport in sensor networks, in: Proc. of IEEE Sensor Network Protocols...
  • B. Yahya et al.

    Energy efficient and QoS based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

    J. Parall. Distrib. Comput.

    (2010)
  • V.C. Gungor et al.

    Industrial wireless sensor networks: challenges, design principles, and technical approaches

    IEEE Trans. Industr. Electron.

    (2009)
  • E. Felemban et al.

    MMSPEED: multi-path multi-SPEED protocol for QoS guarantee of reliability and timeliness in wireless sensor networks

    IEEE Trans. Mobile Commun.

    (2006)
  • M.D. Yarvis, W.S. Conner, L. Krishnamurthy, J. Chhabra, B. Elliott, A. Mainwaring, Real-world experiences with an...
  • J. Chen et al.

    LQER: a link quality estimation based routing for wireless sensor networks

    Sensors

    (2008)
  • T. He, J. Stankovic, C. Lu, T. Abdelzaher, SPEED: a stateless protocol for real-time communication in sensor networks,...
  • M.S. Kordafshari, A. Pourkabirian, K. Faez, A.M. Rahimabadi, Energy-efficient SPEED routing protocol for wireless...
  • A. Mohajerzadeh, M. Yaghmaee, An energy aware routing protocol for real time traffic in wireless sensor networks, in:...
  • Cited by (0)

    Muhammet Macit received the B.S degree in Computer Engineering from Marmara University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2010 and the M.S degree in Computer Engineering from Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey in 2012. He is currently working as a Senior Software Engineer and at the same time pursuing to his Ph.D degree in Computer Engineering from Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey. His current research interests include wireless sensor networks, fraud detection and scalable distributed software design.

    V. Cagri Gungor received his B.S. and M.S. degrees in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from Middle East Technical University, Ankara, Turkey, in 2001 and 2003, respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical and computer engineering from the Broadband and Wireless Networking Laboratory, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA, in 2007 under the supervision of Prof. Ian F. Akyildiz. He was an Associate Professor and the Graduate Programs (Ph.D. and M.S.) Coordinator at the Department of Computer Engineering, Bahcesehir University, Istanbul, Turkey. Currently, he is an Associate Pofessor and Chair of the Computer Engineering Department at Abdullah Gul Univesiy, Kayseri, Turkey. His current research interests are in smart grid communications, machine-to-machine communications, next-generation wireless networks, wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, cognitive radio networks, and IP networks. Dr. Gungor has authored several papers in refereed journals and international conference proceedings, and has been serving as an Editor, and program committee member to numerous journals and conferences in these areas. He is also the recipient of the IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics 2012 Best Paper Award, the IEEE ISCN 2006 Best PaperAward, the European Union FP7 Marie Curie IRG Award in 2009, Turk Telekom Research Grant Awards in 2010 and 2012, and the San-Tez Project Awards supported by Alcatel-Lucent, and the Turkish Ministry of Science, Industry and Technology in 2010.

    Gurkan Tuna serves as an Assistant Professor at Trakya University. He received his B.S. degree in computer engineering from Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 1998, and his M.S. degree in computer engineering from Trakya University, Edirne, Turkey, in 2009. He received his Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul, Turkey, in 2012. Tuna has authored several papers in international conference proceedings and refereed journals, and two book chapters. He has been serving as a reviewer for international journals and conferences. His current research interests include smart grid communications, ad hoc and sensor networks, robotic sensor networks, multisensor fusion, energy harvesting, and energy-aware routing.

    View full text