On Multipath Balancing and Expanding for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

Multiple disjointed paths have been demonstrated to be effective in delivering multimedia traffic in wireless sensor networks, and improving the network performance in terms of bandwidth aggregation, reliability and network lifetime. In this paper, we investigate the use of directional geographical routing for multipath construction for multimedia data dissemination, and identify the challenging issue of achieving multipath balancing in proximity to the source/sink. While our previous work addresses the multipath expanding problem efficiently, this paper presents a novel scheme to achieve the paths balancing distribution to alleviate the contention between the paths when close to the sink. The path construction is divided into expanding phase, parallel phase and converging phase in the proposed scheme, which includes two key algorithms, i.e., the detection algorithm for path construction phase and the deviation angle adjustment algorithm. Simulation results that verify the effectiveness of the proposed scheme are presented.