Multipath Routing Techniques in Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey

Multipath routing is an efficient technique to route data in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) because it can provide reliability, security and load balance, which are especially critical in the resource constrained system such as WSNs. In this paper we provide a survey of the state-of-the-art of proposed multipath routing protocols for WSNs, which are classified into three categories, infrastructure based, non-infrastructure based and coding based, based on the special techniques used in building multiple paths and delivering sensing data. For each category, we study the design of protocols, analyze the tradeoff of each design, and overview several representing protocols. In addition, we give a summery of design goals, challenges, and evaluation metrics for multipath routing protocols in resource constrained systems in general.