Interactive Multipath Routing Protocol for Improving the Routing Performance in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Multipath routing technique is recognized as one of the effective approaches to improve the reliability of data forwarding. However, the traditional multipath routing focuses only on how many paths are needed to ensure a desired reliability. For this purpose, the protocols construct additional paths and thus cause significant energy consumption. These problems have motivated the study for the energy-efficient and reliable data forwarding. Thus, this paper proposes an energy-efficient concurrent multipath routing protocol with a small number of paths based on interaction between paths. The interaction between paths helps to reinforce the multipath reliability by making efficient use of resources. The protocol selects several nodes located in the radio overlapped area between a pair of paths as bridge nodes for the path-interaction. In order to operate the bridge node efficiently, when the transmission failure has detected by overhearing at each path, it performs recovery transmission to recover the path failure. Simulation results show that proposed protocol is superior to the existing multipath protocols in terms of energy consumption and delivery reliability.