MAC Support for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

A wide range of applications such as disaster management, military, and security have fueled interest in sensor networks in recent years. Since the employed sensor nodes often are significantly constrained in their onboard energy, most of the research work, including that on medium access control (MAC) protocols, has focused on optimizing energy consumptions and cared less about data delivery latency. However, employing advanced video and audio sensing devices needs special attention to quality of service requirements associated with multimedia data. This paper presents MAQ, a novel Medium Arbitration scheme for supporting QoS traffic over a single communication channel. MAQ decentralizes the control of the communication resources and fully integrates TDMA and CSMA/CA schemes for medium access. The main objective of MAQ is to ensure predictable delay and fair access for the nodes while achieving high channel utilization and network throughput. The simulation experiments confirm the effectiveness of MAQ.