An Adaptive Energy-aware Multi-path Routing Protocol with Load Balance for Wireless Sensor Networks

Using the available but limited resources of sensors more efficiently has been the recent interest in designing the routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). The major concern includes energy, storage and computing resources. Accordingly, we propose an adaptive energy-aware Multi-path routing protocol with load balance (AEMRP-LB). It introduces a concept named direction-angle to overcome the deficiency of broadcast and takes into account the tradeoff between the residual energy and hop count to establish multiple node-disjoint paths. The traffic load is balanced over the selected paths by using a weighted traffic scheduling algorithm considering their transmitting capacity, and then AEMRP-LB uses the advantages of Multi-path Source Routing to report the acquired data as saving the computing and storage resources of the sensors. In the scene with multiple Source-Sink pairs, AEMRP-LB can adaptively adjust the available residual energy of shared nodes so as to make reasonable use of them. The simulation results show that AEMRP-LB outperforms the two comparative schemes, and the sensors consume the energy in a more equitable way which ensures a more graceful degradation of service with time.