A Low Overhead, Energy Efficient, Sink-initiated Multipath Routing Protocol for Static Wireless Sensor Networks

Multipath routing in wireless sensor networks has been proven to provide with increased data delivery ratio, security, robustness to node and link failures, network throughput, etc. However, the energy cost for multiple routes construction and their maintenance is very high. This paper proposes a sink-initiated, node-disjoint multipath routing protocol for static wireless sensor networks that significantly minimizes the route construction messages and thereby saves the critical batter energy of sensor nodes. It also distributes the traffic load spatially over many nodes in the forwarding paths, which ensures balanced energy consumption in the network and thereby increases the network lifetime. The simulation results show that it decreases the routing overhead as well as the standard deviation of nodes' residual energies.