Recently, reliable data transport in wireless sensor network becomes very crucial for real-time application with different application requirements. Real time multimedia application requires large bandwidth and big memory in the network in order to send video data and needs to arrive at destination in time. Data that arrives at the receiver not in time will be discarded and cannot be played because loss recovery through retransmission of data loss may introduce long delays. Therefore, an implementation of transport protocol in wireless sensor network for multimedia application is a challenging task. Traditional protocol likes TCP and UDP cannot directly applied for real-time communication over wireless sensor network because the lack of functions of real-time services and the unique characteristics of sensor node itself. However there is another transport protocol which is the Stream Control Transmission Protocol (SCTP) that provides multi-stream service for single connection. This feature can be applied for video transmission according to the type of frame to be transmitted. Thus, to achieve the high reliability video data delivery, the advantages of multi-streaming features in SCTP with the combination of low data rate wireless sensor networks will be applied for the new proposed transport protocol. Besides that, transport protocol algorithm also allows maximum network lifetime due to the limited operating lifetime of sensor node and multimedia also is a highly power consuming task. Thus, to prolong the lifetime of wireless sensor network, an efficient transport protocol need to support reliable message delivery and provide congestion control in the most energy efficient. This paper focuses on the existing transport protocols for real-time application and the future protocol that provides the entire requirement of transport protocol.
Wireless Sensor Network transport protocol: A critical review
