An energy-efficient multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

The energy consumption is a key design criterion for the routing protocols in wireless sensor networks. Some of the conventional single path routing schemes may not be optimal to maximize the network lifetime and connectivity. In this paper, we propose a distributed, scalable and localized multipath search protocol to discover multiple node-disjoint paths between the sink and source nodes. We also propose a load balancing algorithm to distribute the traffic over the multiple paths discovered. We compare our proposed scheme with the directed diffusion, directed transmission, N-to-1 multipath routing, and the energy-aware routing protocols. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme has a higher node energy efficiency, lower average delay and control overhead than those protocols. Copyright (C) 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.