Equal Size Clusters to Reduce Congestion in Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs) are a particular instance of Wireless Sensor Networks that support the transmission of multimedia data such as video, image or sound. Those multimedia data should be delivered with a variety of predefined levels of Quality of Service swhich imposes the development of specific routing protocols. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol based on clustering, that balances the number of nodes in clusters, called Equal Size Clusters to reduce Congestion in WMSNs. We seek to balance the number of members in each cluster in order to reduce intra-cluster congestion and reduce the number of congested cluster-heads. Therefore, we propose a novel metric called Maximum Cluster-heads Utilization Ratio (MCUR) that indicates the largest number of members assigned to a cluster-head to ensure a reliable transmission of multimedia data. Simulation results indicate that our proposed scheme outperforms other protocols proposed in the literature in terms of MCUR, number of cluster-heads and energy consumed.