A Forwarding Scheme for (m, k)-firm Streams Based on Local Decision in Wireless Sensor Networks

— As the technology of multimedia sensor networks is desired in large numbers of applications nowadays, real-time service becomes one of the most important research challenges. Even though lots of related works have been conducted to meet this requirement in several ways, the specific traffic model for real-time has not been taken yet. Thus, it causes lack of adaptability of those approaches in real deployment. To solve this problem, in this paper, we model the application via (m,k)-firm streams which have weakly hard real-time property. And then, a novel forwarding scheme based on modified DBP (Distance-Based Priority) is proposed by considering local-DBP and stream DBP together. Local-DBP can contribute to identify the detailed causes of unsatisfied quality, that is, network congestion or wireless link failure. Simulation results reveal that (m,k)-firm is a good traffic model for multimedia sensor networks and the proposed scheme can contribute to guarantee real-time requirement well.