Security-quality aware routing for wireless multimedia sensor networks using secret sharing

Security and video quality are progressively significant attributes for wireless multimedia sensor networks. Most of existing research considers security and video quality separately. However, it is crucial to integrate security and video quality together for video transmission because delivering video data across a secure path does not often meet video quality requirements in many traditional approaches. Applying the general concept of secret sharing algorithm on a data packet and delivering it through disjoint multipaths can be considered to deliver the data securely. However, using the general concept of secret sharing is not efficient when large-size video data are routed. To tackle these issues, we propose a novel security and quality aware routing SQAR protocol to address these two issues concurrently. We jointly consider security and video quality in wireless multimedia networks by proposing a video distortion model based on a new secret image sharing scheme. In SQAR, a secret image sharing is only applied on the intra-frames of the video codec H.264 and can significantly reduce the transmission overheads. Simulation results show that SQAR scheme can achieve better trade-off between the security and quality over the traditional routing protocols. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.