Improving multimedia data transmission quality in wireless multimedia sensor networks though priority-based data collection

Abstract

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) are special kinds of wireless sensor networks (WSN) that can send multimedia data such as audio and video streams. Sensors used in WMSNs are smart, tiny, and resource constraint sensor nodes (SNs) distributed in a large area. Typically, multimedia data are large in comparison to other data types. As a result, WMSNs have to deal with high volumes of packet transmission, leading to a high rate of packet loss and network congestion. Network congestion can significantly affect the quality of service and usually lead to high energy consumption. Thus, to improve the quality of service (QoS) and transmission performance, it is necessary to deal with network congestion. In the past, different packet prioritizing methods were proposed to deal with this issue. However, improving QoS usually requires high energy to function correctly. Consequently, using rechargeable sensor nodes to reduce energy consumption is an acute solution. In this research, priority-based data collection is considered to cut down on data distortion and improve the QoS of the multimedia sensor network. Additionally, energy harvesting sensor nodes were used to reduce energy consumption due to the high transmission rate. The simulation result shows a noticeable improvement in the performance of our proposed method in comparison to previous methods.