Performance of transport protocols for multimedia communications in wireless sensor networks

Many wireless sensor network (WSN) applications require efficient multimedia communication capabilities. However, the existing communication protocols in the literature mainly aim to achieve energy efficiency and reliability objectives and do not address multimedia communication challenges in WSN. In this paper, comprehensive performance evaluation of the existing transport protocols is performed for multimedia communication in WSN. Performance metrics such as packet delivery rate, end-to-end packet delay, bandwidth and energy efficiency, frame peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR), delay-bounded frame PSNR, frame delivery probability, frame end-to-end delay and jitter are investigated. The results clearly show that the existing transport protocols are far from satisfying the requirements of multimedia communication in WSN and hence there is a need for new effective multimedia delivery protocols for WSN.