A lightweight reliability mechanism proposed for datagram congestion control protocol over wireless multimedia sensor networks

Transmission of multimedia data over wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) is a challenging task and requires an effective design for the transport layer protocols to meet both the resource-constrained WMSN and the requirements of multimedia streaming. The standard transport layer protocols (eg, UDP, TCP, SCTP, and DCCP) have been shown inefficient to transport multimedia data over WMSN without modification in the design of end-to-end (ETE) reliability and the congestion control mechanisms. This paper proposed a lightweight reliability mechanism for datagram congestion control protocol (LW-DCCP) over WMSNs. The lightweight reliability mechanism consists of caching and retransmission algorithms that consider the resource-constrained WMSNs and the requirements of video streaming over WMSN. Moreover, this paper presents an important modification to TCP-friendly rate control congestion control mechanism that calculates the loss interval based on intracoded frame sending time. The LW-DCCP has been evaluated through comprehensive simulation experiments and compared with baseline transport protocols using the 2 frameworks (Eval-SCTP and Eval-DCCP) that we developed in NS-2 environment. The experimental results show that LW-DCCP ensures effective congestion control and ETE reliability for video transmission over WMSN. In addition, LW-DCCP experiences better performance in terms of energy consumption, ETE delay, jitter delay, frame delivery ratio, frame peak signal-to-noise ratio, and visual quality of the received video as compared to the baseline transport layer protocols.