Routing in wireless multimedia sensor networks: A survey and challenges ahead

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) have drawn tremendous attention because of their potential impact on scientific research and their numerous attractive applications. Routing in WMSNs has been an active area of research in the past few years. The transmission of multimedia data depends on a routing protocol to determine stable and resource-efficient path, and to provide varying levels of Quality-of-Service (QoS)/Quality-of-Experience (QoE) guarantee for multimedia. However, it is a challenging problem due to the limited network resources and complicated operations of multimedia applications as well as dynamic changes of network condition. This paper begins with the challenges and requirements in the design of WMSN routing, followed by an exhaustive survey on routing from the perspective of application requirements and key techniques. In particular, the existing routing solutions are classified into five major categories based on their design and optimization objectives, that is, QoS provisioning, multimedia awareness, energy efficiency, congestion avoidance, bandwidth optimization. Finally, we will discuss the open research issues in routing metrics and several potential research areas regarding routing in emerging WMSN application scenarios.