| Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are sets of small, low-power, low-cost sensing devices with wireless communication capabilities, which collaborate in larger sensing tasks. The resource-constrained nature of the sensor nodes is the most limiting factor in this type of network, presenting a significant challenge for the support of multimedia traffic with quality of service (QoS) requirements. This thesis proposes a QoS routing protocol for a wireless sensor network of video and imaging sensors that achieves a good balance between energy efficiency and real-time traffic performance. The proposed protocol is based on distributing energy-intensive tasks across the network, and incorporates QoS metric estimation and efficient resource allocation to allow the support of video and imaging traffic over resource-constrained nodes while extending the overall network lifetime. Analytical and simulation techniques are used to evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol in terms of end-to-end delay and energy consumption, showing improvements in overall network lifetime while maintaining high quality of service. |
