QoS-aware MAC protocol design for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Abstract

Growing necessities of the sensory applications has emerged a new subset of Wireless Sensor Networks called Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks which commonly carry Quality of Service (QoS)-constrained heterogeneous traffic. In order to deliver this heterogeneous traffic in highly resource constrained sensor networks and satisfy their QoS requirements properly, QoS-provisioning becomes unavoidable. As a result of an extensive survey about QoS-provisioning in sensor networks, QoS perspectives and parameters are investigated and challenging issues are pointed out. Existing MAC protocols are surveyed and followed by QoS-aware MAC protocol design tradeoffs with their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, Properties of a well-designed QoS-aware MAC protocol are defined. In this thesis, we propose Diff-MAC; a novel QoS-aware and hybrid priority-based MAC protocol for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks. Diff-MAC aims increasing the utilization of the channel with effective service differentiation mechanisms while providing fair and fast delivery of the data. A real-life scenario framed for performance evaluation of Diff-MAC and results obtained through extensive simulations show significant improvements on the performance of the network compared to existing protocols.