Meshed multipath routing with selective forwarding: an efficient strategy in wireless sensor networks

Due to limited functionalities and potentially large number of sensors, existing routing strategies proposed for mobile ad hoc networks are not directly applicable to wireless sensor networks. In this paper, we present a meshed multipath routing (M-MPR) protocol with selective forwarding (SF) of packets and end-to-end forward error correction (FEC) coding. We also describe a meshed multipath searching scheme suitable for sensor networks, which has a reduced signaling overhead and nodal database. Our performance evaluations show that (1) M-MPR achieves a much improved throughput over conventional disjoint multipath routing with comparable power consumption and receiver complexity; (2) to successfully route a message using FEC coding, selective forwarding (SF) consumes much less network resources, such as channel bandwidth and battery power, than packet replication (or limited flooding). (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.