Transport Protocol Performance for Multi-Hop Transmission in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN)

The need for reliable data delivery at the transport layer for video transmission over IEEE 802.15.4 Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has attracted great attention from the research community due to the applicability of multimedia transmission for many applications. The IEEE 802.15.4 standard is designed to transmit data within a network at a low rate and a short distance. However, the characteristics of WSNs such as dense deployment, limited processing ability, memory, and power supply provide unique challenges to transport protocol designers. Additionally, multimedia applications add further challenges such as requiring large bandwidth, large memory, and high data rate. This chapter discusses the challenges and evaluates the feasibility of transmitting data over an IEEE 802.15.4 network for different transport protocols. The analysis result highlights the comparison of standard transport protocols, namely User Datagram Protocol (UDP), Transport Control Protocol (TCP), and Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP). The performance metrics are analyzed in terms of the packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, and end-to-end delay. Based on the study and analysis that has been done, the standard transport protocol can be modified and improved for multimedia data transmission in WSN. As a conclusion, SCTP shows significant improvement up to 18.635% and 40.19% for delivery ratio compared to TCP and UDP, respectively.