Energy Aware Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Networks(WSNs) are made of sensor nodes with restricted battery life and transmission capability. In this work we propose an energy efficient multipath routing algorithm in WSN. This protocol is designed to improve the latency, resiliency and efficiency through discovering multiple paths from the source to the destination. It has a sink initiated Route Discovery process with the location information of the source known to the sink. There are two types of nodes which are used here one is primary and the other is alternate. At the end of the route formation one primary path and multiple number of alternate paths are built,and, all nodes except the primary are put to sleep mode which helps us to save energy and generate a collision free path, the primary path is used to transmit the data from source to the sink and if the route disrupts, the next best alternate route is used for the purpose and if no path exists between the source and destination then process starts from the beginning. Our simulation finds the latency, packet delivery ratio, average control packet overhead and total energy consumed. The proposed protocol has 12% (approx.) less control packet overhead in comparison to MR2 and LIEMRO,5% less average energy consumption in comparison to MR2 and 28% less average energy consumption in comparison to LIEMRO. Regarding latency the proposed protocol has similar result to MR2 but in comparison to LIEMRO the algorithm is 24% faster. Lastly in case of Packet Delivery Ratio the proposed protocol gives 5% better result in comparison to MR2 and, 12% better result in comparison to LIEMRO on an average.