LQEAR: Link Quality and Energy-Aware Routing for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) consist of smart sensor nodes that retrieve multimedia data and scalar sensor data. Currently, because of their popularity, WMSNs are used in a variety of applications. Handling and routing large amount of multimedia data in resource constrained network to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) is a challenge. In WMSNs, communication links are typically error-prone and unreliable. The presence of bad quality links on a path may cause higher packet error rate and results in low throughput. This paper presents Link Quality and Energy-Aware Routing (LQEAR) scheme, which finds energy-aware high-quality links along the path. Next forwarding node is selected based on the link quality, remaining energy and the distance between next forwarding node and the sink. The adaptive cost function can be customized for reliable and high throughput transmission, high network lifetime, and for balanced optimal QoS performance. LQEAR finds multiple node-disjoint paths between source and sink node. Simulation results show that LQEAR selects excellent quality links to offer better reliability, high throughput, and efficiently balance energy consumption of nodes to extend network lifetime.