A Slotted-sense Streaming MAC for Real-time Multimedia Data Transmission in Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks

To attain a flawless real-time data transfer over a communication channel of Industrial Wireless Sensor Networks (IWSNs) is a difficult issue. The reason is that data transmission reliability degrades remarkably due to the dynamically changing network topology. Although TDMA-based protocols are widely used for real-time data transmission in IWSNs, they are not suitable for dynamically changing network topology. Therefore, we analyze the communication behavior of real-time multimedia data transmission and try to find out some performance enhancing factors. Then, we propose a slotted-sense scheduling scheme in which a big time slot is shared among the nodes at same tree-level. A sharable slot not only assures the time constraint but also improves the reliability of multimedia data greatly. Moreover, the block data transmission technique with an adaptive acknowledgement is proposed to optimize the size of a sharable slot. Finally, the experimental results show that our approach outperforms other standard MAC protocols for real-time multimedia data transmission in IWSNs.