Reliability and End-to-End Delay Evaluation of Outdoor and Indoor Environments for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks (WMSNs) require real-time quality-of-service (QoS) guarantees to be provided by the network. The reliability and end-to-end delay are very critical metrics for QoS guarantees in WMSNs. However, radio transmission errors incurred by wireless channel make it difficult to achieve these qualities simultaneously. To provide good quality of service (QoS) of WMSNs, parameters associated with the WMSNs need to be studied completely and best trade-off needs to be made. This article focuses on characterization of the end-to-end delay and reliability for WMSNs. We model end-to-end delay and reliability constraint in a tree topology by assuming that each packet is allowed fixed number of retransmissions. To characterize the end-to-end delay and reliability, first, our goal is to evaluate the performance measures of the system, such as end-to-end delay and reliability in different situations and against different choices of system parameters. Second, we characterize how the end-to-end delay and reliability affect the performance of the wireless multimedia sensor networks under indoor and outdoor environments. All scenarios are simulated with multiple run-times by using NS-2 simulator and the results are evaluated and discussed.