Maximally Radio-Disjoint Multipath Routing for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Abstract: In wireless sensor networks, bandwidth is one of precious resources to multimedia applications. To get more bandwidth, multipath routing is one appropriate solution provided that inter-path interferences are minimized. In this paper, we address the problem of interfering paths in the context of wireless multimedia sensor networks and consider both intra-session as well as inter-session interferences. Our main objective is to provide necessary bandwidth to multimedia applications through non-interfering paths while increasing the network lifetime. To do so, we adopt an incremental approach where for a given session, only one path is built at once. Additional paths are built when required, typically in case of congestion or bandwidth shortage. Interference awareness and energy saving are achieved by switching a subset of sensor nodes in a {\em passive state} in which they do not take part in the routing process. Despite the routing overhead introduced by the incremental approach we adopt, our simulations show that this can be compensated by the overall achieved throughput and the amount of consumed energy per correctly received packet especially for relatively long sessions such as multimedia ones. This is mainly due to the fact that a small number of non-interfering paths allows for better performances than a large number of interfering ones.