A Comprehensive Analysis of the End-to-End Delay for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) require real-time quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to be provided by the network. The end-to-end delay is very critical metric for QoS guarantees in WMSNs. In WMSNs, due to the transmission errors incurred over wireless channels, it is difficult to obtain reliable delivery of data in conjunction with low end-to-end delay. In order to improve the end-to-end delay performance, the system has to drop few packets during network congestion. In this article, our proposal is based on optimization of end-to end delay for WMSNs. We optimize end-to-end delay constraint by assuming that each packet is allowed fixed number of retransmissions. To optimize the end-to-end delay, first, we compute the performance measures of the system, such as end-to-end delay and reliability for different network topologies (e.g., linear topology, tree topology) and against different choices of system parameters (e.g., data rate, number of nodes, number of retransmissions). Second, we study the impact of the end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio on indoor and outdoor environments in WMSNs. All scenarios are simulated with multiple runtimes by using network simulator-2 (NS-2) and results are evaluated and discussed.