A Survey on Transport Protocols for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless networks composed of multimedia-enabled resource-constrained sensor nodes have enriched a large set of monitoring sensing applications. In such communication scenario, however, new challenges in data transmission and energy-efficiency have arisen due to the stringent requirements of those sensor networks. Generally, congested nodes may deplete the energy of the active congested paths toward the sink and incur in undesired communication delay and packet dropping, while bit errors during transmission may negatively impact the end-to-end quality of the received data. Many approaches have been proposed to face congestion and provide reliable communications in wireless sensor networks, usually employing some transport protocol that address one or both of these issues. Nevertheless, due to the unique characteristics of multimedia-based wireless sensor networks, notably minimum bandwidth demand, bounded delay and reduced energy consumption requirement, communication protocols from traditional scalar wireless sensor networks are not suitable for multimedia sensor networks. In the last decade, such requirements have fostered research in adapting existing protocols or proposing new protocols from scratch. We survey the state of the art of transport protocols for wireless multimedia sensor networks, addressing the recent developments and proposed strategies for congestion control and loss recovery. Future research directions are also discussed, outlining the remaining challenges and promising investigation areas.