Energy Efficient Cross Layer Multipath Routing for Image Delivery in Wireless Sensor Networks

Owing to limited energy in wireless devices power saving is very critical to prolong the lifetime of the networks. In this regard, we designed a cross-layer optimization mechanism based on power control in which source node broadcasts a Route Request Packet (RREQ) containing information such as node id, image size, end to end bit error rate (BER) and residual battery energy to its neighbor nodes to initiate a multimedia session. Each intermediate node appends its remaining battery energy, link gain, node id and average noise power to the RREQ packet. Upon receiving the RREQ packets, the sink node finds node disjoint paths and calculates the optimal power vectors for each disjoint path using cross layer optimization algorithm. Sink based cross-layer maximal minimal residual energy (MMRE) algorithm finds the number of image packets that can be sent on each path and sends the Route Reply Packet (RREP) to the source on each disjoint path which contains the information such as optimal power vector, remaining battery energy vector and number of packets that can be sent on the path by the source. Simulation results indicate that considerable energy saving can be accomplished with the proposed cross layer power control algorithm.