Interference aware multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Using multiple paths to transmit data simultaneously in wireless sensor networks is regarded to reduce end-to-end delay and achieve higher throughput. However, the interference between these multiple paths causes a significant reduction in the overall performance. Previous methods tried to solve this problem either with the aid of special hardware or under unrealistic assumption, such as the interference range is the same as the communication range. In this paper, we propose a novel interference aware multipath routing (IAMR) protocol for wireless sensor networks. Without any special hardware support, IAMR can establish interference minimized paths in a simple and efficient way and is also applied for the realistic situation that the interference range is twice as the communication range. We evaluate IAMR by comparing with AOMDV protocol and extensive simulations show that IAMR achieves good performance in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, throughput and energy usage balancing.