| The potential applications enabled by unattended small wireless sensor devices, capable of collecting information from the environment and organizing themselves in an ad hoc manner to relay data to a remote observer, have motivated the research work presented in this thesis dissertation. Wireless sensor network (WSN) applications can range from military, surveillance and emergency response to health care, traffic control, and vital body conditions monitoring. In addition, the recent development of low-cost wireless multimedia hardware has enabled the integration of multimedia capabilities into WSNs. The research of wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) is a relatively new field and it is envisioned that it will enhance several existing classes of WSN applications and motivate the development of new and ambitious ones.;In this thesis dissertation, we focus upon the design and performance evaluation of a suite of protocols for wireless multimedia sensor networks: data routing in wireless sensor networks and interactive multimedia streaming in a wireless multimedia sensor networks. To this end, we propose the design of low-latency and reliable routing protocols for WSNs that aim simplicity and efficiency, and we propose and evaluate a hybrid mobile data gathering protocol for WSNs that should not only reduce data delivery latency, but also contribute to alleviating the bottleneck problem at static data aggregation points. We also propose a suite of protocols that enable interactive multimedia streaming over wireless multimedia sensor networks for thin mobile devices. We present our protocols, discuss their implementation, and report on their performance evaluation based on an extensive set of simulation experiments. |
