Locally selectable protocol for sparse, highly-volatile, robotic wireless video sensor networks
Mustafa Ayad, Richard M. Voyles, Jaewook Bae · International Journal of Sensor Networks · 2016
Wireless video sensor networks (WVSNs) are a specialisation of wireless sensor networks that focus on high bandwidth transmission with low latency and under low power conditions. This type of network might be applied is in multi-robot exploration for urban search and rescue (USAR). We propose a new hybrid routing protocol, called locally selectable protocol (LSP), on top of a Bluetooth piconet architecture that provides high-bandwidth, multi-hop routing with reduced latency and very low power consumption for sparse topologies that are highly volatile, yet are continuously streaming video. We take advantage of the hybrid combination of proactive and reactive routing schemes. We simulate and implement the proposed scheme on a small team of resource-constrained USAR robots, called TerminatorBot. We have shown that our protocol on top of Bluetooth maintains higher bandwidth with lower latency to dropped nodes and lower overall power consumption in comparison to existing solutions that support ZigBee and Wi-Fi.