A survey on multipath routing techniques in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of tiny sensor nodes to sense the environmental data that are transferred to the sink node via route discovered using unicast/multipath routing protocol. The multipath routing protocols improve load balancing and quality of service in addition to the reliable transfer of sensed data to the sink simultaneously by reducing delay and congestion. This survey gives a brief introduction about the existing multipath routing protocols in the literature and its classifications into four categories as follows. 1) Distributed meta-heuristic-based route discovery uses intelligent algorithms for path discovery; 2) local-heuristic knowledge-based route discovery uses node level statistics to discover the route; 3) route discovery specific to multimedia applications; 4) route discovery for secure transmission of data. A comparison between these protocols in terms of various routing parameters for path discovery, traffic distribution, and path maintenance is described for each class of multipath routing protocols.