Energy Efficient Adaptive Multipath Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Routing in wireless sensor networks is a demanding task. This demand has led to a number of routing protocols which efficiently utilize the limited resources available at the sensor nodes. All these protocols typically find the minimum energy path. In this paper we take a view that, always using the minimum energy path deprives the nodes energy quickly and the time taken to determine an alternate path increases. Multipath routing schemes distribute traffic among multiple paths instead of routing all the traffic along a single path. Two key questions that arise in multipath routing are how many paths are needed and how to select these paths. Clearly, the number and the quality of the paths selected dictate the performance of a multipath routing scheme. We propose an energy efficient adaptive multipath routing technique which utilizes multiple paths between source and the sink, adaptive because they have low routing overhead. This protocol is intended to provide a reliable transmission environment with low energy consumption, by efficiently utilizing the energy availability and the received signal strength of the nodes to identify multiple routes to the destination. Simulation results show that the energy efficient adaptive multipath routing scheme achieves much higher performance than the classical routing protocols, even in the presence of high node density and overcomes simultaneous packet forwarding