Fault-Tolerant Mechanism for Multimedia Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The various reasons of failures that affect reliability of sensor nodes in addition to processing and transfer of large multimedia content (image, audio and video) have posed new challenges that are nowadays a real threat for routing protocols in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs), which aim to ensure flow delivery while guaranteeing QoS requirements. Moreover, extending network lifetime and maintaining network stability to cope with breaking links and topology changes (failures or sensor mobility), remain unsolved issues, particularly, during data transmission phase. Therefore, in this paper, we jointly consider multipath transmission, load balancing and fault tolerance, to enhance the reliability of transmitted data. We propose a Geographic Multipath routing protocol reinforced by Fault-Tolerant mechanism (GMFT). Theoricals results and those obtained from both simulation study and experiments on a real testbed demonstrate the validity and efficiency of our proposed protocol, and indicate that it is highly advised for multimedia transmission and network stability.