Multimedia Transmission in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks are an emerging technology that can provide valuable information for a large series of monitoring and control applications. Comprising many monitoring scenarios with different particularities, as industrial management, weather forecasting, home automation, traffic management and rescue operations, just to cite a few, wireless sensor networks bring many possibilities for innovative applications that cannot be addressed by conventional wireless network technologies. When sensors are equipped with cameras or microphones, multimedia data can be retrieved from the monitored field, enriching the perception of the target area. However, the constrained nature of wireless sensor networks imposes many challenges to multimedia transmission, fostering development of optimized protocols. In this chapter, we present the state of the art of multimedia transmission in wireless sensor networks, covering topics as routing, error control, congestion avoidance, real-time delivery, compression and QoS, potentially supporting in the development of wireless multimedia sensor networks.