Multi-priority Multi-path Selection for Video Streaming in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Video sensors are used in wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) to enhance the capability for event description. Due to the limited transmission capacity of sensor nodes, a single path often cannot meet the requirement of video transmission. Consequently, multi-path transmission is needed. However, not every path found by multi-path routing algorithms may be suitable for transmitting video, because a long routing path with a long end to end transmission delay may not satisfy the time constraint of the video. Furthermore, each video stream includes two kinds of information: image and audio streams. In different applications, image and audio streams play different roles, and the importance levels are different. Higher priority should be given to the more important stream (either the image stream or the audio stream) to guarantee the using of limited bandwidth and energy in WMSNs. In this paper, we propose a Multi-priority Multi-path Selection (MPMPS) scheme in transport layer to choose the maximum number of paths from all found node-disjoint routing paths for maximizing the throughput of streaming data transmission. Simulation results show that MPMPS can effectively choose the maximum number of paths for video transmission.