Efficient multi-constrained QoS path selection in wireless multimedia sensor networks

Wireless multimedia sensor networks(WMSN) are designed to meet the requirements of sensing surrounding environment with more fine granularity and more accurate information. In order to transmit multi-constrained QoS multimedia flows with large scale data and information, such as image, voice and video etc., multi-constrained QoS path selection is a big challenge and a key problem in WMSN where energy is limited and network topology may change dynamically. It has been proved that such a problem is NP-complete. Heuristic algorithms with polynomial and pseudo-polynomial-time complexities are often used to deal with this problem. However, existing solutions, most of which suffered from either excessive computational complexities or low performance and can not guarantee the quality of final configuration, were proposed only for wired networks and cannot be used directly in WMSN. In this paper a novel multi-constrained QoS path selection scheme based on enhanced simulated annealing is proposed and a more refined cooling schedule is constructed while two key factors, attenuation function of control parameter T and termination value of T were concerned. Furthermore, the influence of some classical random generators on the algorithms performance is investigated. Theoretical analysis and experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method, which can greatly enhance the quality of final configuration while not sacrificing the algorithm complexity, is an effective multi-constrained QoS path selection algorithm showing better performance than the other pertinent algorithms.