Interference-Minimized Multipath Routing with Congestion Control in Wireless Sensor Network for High-Rate Streaming

High-rate streaming in WSN is required for future applications to provide high-quality information of battlefield hot spots. Although recent advances have enabled large-scale WSN to be deployed supported by high-bandwidth backbone network for high-rate streaming, the WSN remains the bottleneck due to the low-rate radios used and the effects of wireless interferences. First, we propose a technique to evaluate the quality of a pathset for multipath load balancing, taking into consideration the effects of wireless interferences and that nodes may interfere beyond communication ranges. Second, we propose an interference- minimized multipath routing (I2MR) protocol that increases throughput by discovering zone-disjoint paths for load balancing, requiring minimal localization support. Third, we propose a congestion control scheme that further increases throughput by loading the paths for load balancing at the highest possible rate supportable. Finally, we validate thepath-set evaluation technique and also evaluate the I2MR protocol and congestion control scheme by comparing with AODV protocol and node-disjoint multipath routing (NDMR) protocol. Simulation results show that I2MR with congestion control achieves on average 230% and 150% gains in throughput over AODV and NDMR respectively, and consumes comparable or at most 24% more energy than AODV but up to 60% less energy than NDMR.