Fuzzy-based congestion control for wireless multimedia sensor networks

Congestion is a challenging problem for sensor networks because it causes the waste of communication and reduces energy efficiency. Compared to traditional wireless sensor networks, the probability of congestion occurrence in wireless multimedia sensor networks is higher due to the high volume of data arising from multimedia streaming. In this article, problems for multimedia transmission over wireless multimedia sensor networks are examined and sensor fuzzy-based image transmission (SUIT); a new progressive image transport protocol is proposed as a solution. SUIT provides fuzzy logic-based congestion estimation and an efficient congestion mitigation technique which decreases the image quality on-the-fly to an acceptable level. In case of congestion, SUIT drops some packets of the frames in a smart way and thus transmits frames to the sink with lower, but acceptable quality. In this way, SUIT improves the continuity of the video streaming. We evaluate the performance of SUIT by comparing it with two different competitors. The first one is an example transport protocol, namely Fuzzy Logic-Based Congestion Estimation. The second one is a buffer occupancy-based congestion control mechanism which is commonly used in previous studies. According to the simulation results, SUIT provides better energy consumption, frame delivery, frame loss and frame latency performance than its competitors.