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With the technology development, the communication has become increasingly more effective, and the speed and reliability with which data travels to its destination have been greatly improved. However, new requirements have emerged. Wireless sensor networks (WSN) have the obligation to support a dynamic topology with mobile clients, for instance. In this way, structured or ad-hoc communication has been an area of intensive research and investment, which is the case of sensors. They not only satisfy the necessity of creating mobile networks quickly and effectively, but also have a wide scope of application, such as remote environmental monitoring, security systems, among others.

The recent technological evolution allowed the creation of cheap hardware pieces, based on complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors. The integration of those with devices capable of wireless communication led to the development of multimedia sensors able to perform the transmission of video and audio streams. Furthermore, combined with the natural evolution of the devices' configurations and of the signals processing technologies, this integration created the networks entitled Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSNs). Thus, the better capability of event description with multimedia sensors allowed the emergence and the evolution of several kinds of applications.

The communication among the RSSFM's devices on the network and transport layers has to take into account the creation of routes, priorization of packets, congestion control and error recovery. The good performance of those operation gives support to the multimedia traffic, which is heavy in its own nature and demands that its transmissions meet the application requirements. This work presents initially the needed knowledge for the conceptual understanding of WMSNs, pointing its main requirements. Then, the most recent works that act on the network and transport layers with focus on WMSNs are detailed. The advantages and disadvantages of each one of those protocols are presented, indication issues to be addressed.



Last update on April, 2011.