Enabling reliable and power efficient real-time multimedia delivery over wireless sensor networks

There is an increasing need to run real-time multimedia applications, e.g. battle field and border surveillance, over Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). In WSNs, packet delivery exhibits high packet loss rate due to congestion, wireless channel high bit error rate, route failure, signal attenuation, etc... Flooding conventional packets over all sensors redundantly provides reliable delivery. However, flooding real-time multimedia packets is energy inefficient for power limited sensors and causes severe contentions affecting reliable delivery. We propose the Flooding Zone Initialization Protocol (FZIP) to enhance reliability and reduce power consumption of real-time multimedia flooding in WSNs. FZIP is a setup protocol which constrains flooding within a small subset of intermediate nodes called Flooding Zone (FZ). Also, we propose the Flooding Zone Control Protocol (FZCP) which monitors the session quality and dynamically changes the FZ size to adapt to current network state, thus providing a tradeoff of good quality and less power consumption