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

Rapid penetration of small, customized wireless devices and enormous growth of wireless communication technologies has already set the stage for large-scale deployment of wireless sensor networks. While the need to minimize the energy consumption has driven significant researches in wireless sensor networks, offering some precise quality of service (QoS) for multimedia transmission over sensor networks has not received significant attention. However, the emerging new applications like video surveillance, telemedicine and traffic monitoring needs transmission of wireless multimedia over sensor networks. Naturally, offering some better QoS for wireless multimedia over sensor networks raises significant challenges. The network needs to cope up with battery-constraints, while providing improved QoS (end-to-end delay and bandwidth requirement). This calls for a suitable sensory MAC protocol capable of achieving application-specific QoS. in this paper, we have proposed a new QoS-based sensory MAC protocol, which not only adapts to application-oriented QoS, but also attempts to conserve energy without violating QoS-constraints. Performance modeling, analysis and simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of providing lower delay and better throughput, at the cost of reasonable energy consumption, in comparison to other existing sensory MAC protocols. (C) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.