关键词: 多宿主, 多连接, 可靠性, 无线多媒体传感器

Abstract:  Efficient and reliable communication is critical for multimedia sensor networks such as real-time video surveillance. It is very challenging to attain such communication, as the sensors may not have the stable connection paths to their corresponding servers/sink nodes due to bandwidth constraints. On the other hand, the instability of the wireless paths may cause temporarily unreachability between the servers and the sensor nodes. As a consequence, users may suffer from the losing of their data or having the bad usage experiences. To overcome this problem, this paper designs and implements a novel multi-homed connection system for wireless multimedia sensors from the following aspects: (1) A system architecture enables the multimedia sensor to connect to multiple servers at the same time. (2) A novel multi-homed transmission protocol runs for the sensors to adapt to various Wi-Fi environments and application usages. (3) Extensive experiment results show that the system and protocol can improve the reliability of the multimedia data transmission. Compared with the traditional single-homed connection scheme, the system can always maintain the stable connection with nearly the same bandwidth, memory and CPU resource utilization.

Key words: multi-homed, multi-connection, reliability, wireless multimedia sensor