Single-Path Streaming Optimized Routing Protocol for Dense Wireless Sensor Networks

The Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have advanced to the multimedia processing and streaming applications in the recent past with the advent of higher end motes like the iMote2. The data rates available from the radios of the WSN nodes are low so that for streaming applications to be sustained in these networks, special cares have to be taken to allow only one streaming path in any node’s neighborhood, which means in a common sink network, all the protocol layers in the nodes are optimized for maintaining a single streaming path in the network at any point of time. In a dense WSN, for single path optimized streaming for maximum throughput, the MAC and routing layers have to be specially designed to avoid traffic generation from nodes in the vicinity of an ongoing streaming path. In this paper, a routing protocol is described which is built on top of a streaming MAC protocol called MLMAC. The Single-path Streaming Optimized Routing Protocol (SPSORP) establishes the routing table during the initialization phase of the protocol and suspends the route updates when streaming is detected in the vicinity of a node. The simulation in OMNeT++ simulator confirms the possibility of streaming in a dense WSN with the combination of MLMAC and SPSORD to the tune of compressed voice streaming rates with iMote2 hardware platform.