Energy Efficient Multipath Routing in Large Scale Sensor Networks with Multiple Sink Nodes

Due to the battery resource constraint, it is a critical issue to save energy in wireless sensor networks, particularly in large sensor networks. One possible solution is to deploy multiple sink nodes simultaneously. In this paper, we propose a protocol called MRMS (Multipath Routing in large scale sensor networks with Multiple Sink nodes) which incorporates multiple sink nodes, a new path cost metric for improving path selection, dynamic cluster maintenance and path switching to improve energy efficiency. MRMS is shown to increase the lifetime of sensor nodes substantially compared to other algorithms based on a series of simulation experiments.