Forepressure Transmission Control for Wireless Video Sensor Networks

Abstract—Multi-source data transmission in wireless video sensor networks is a challenging problem because of the high bandwidth demand of video streams and the many-to-one traffic pattern. This paper proposes forepressure transmission control for efficient and fair video transmission in this scenario. Contrary to traditional backpressure transmission control where down-stream node creates backpressure and causes upstream node to hold off when its buffer is full, forepressure transmission control creates forepressure and signals upstream node to transmit when the downstream node’s buffer is not full. Forepressure transmis-sion control proactively avoids congestion at little communication overhead. In addition, it is able to provide fairness among concurrent flows. We evaluate forepressure transmission control via NS-2 simulations, and compare it with both backpressure congestion control and end-to-end rate regulation. Results in three typical topologies show that forepressure transmission control achieves much lower loss ratio and ensures better fairness than the other two schemes. Index Terms—wireless sensor network; video transmission; hop-by-hop control; fair rate allocatio