Multipath Routing for High-Data Rate Applications in ZigBee Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we propose ZMR (ZigBee Multipath Routing), a novel hybrid multipath routing protocol for ZigBee/IEEE 802.15.4 networks. The main goal is to improve the global throughput which is basically insufficient in ZigBee-based Wireless Sensor Networks to satisfy high bandwidth requirements for high traffic applications like structure health monitoring systems, human health care systems and multimedia surveillance systems. The solution is based on the parent-child links and the availability of hierarchical address allocation process of the cluster-tree topology and the neighboring links. We compare our proposed multipath routing to the ZigBee one-path hierarchical tree routing TR through detailed simulations which showed that the proposed multipath routing enhances application performance in terms of effective bandwidth needed for high data rate applications, packet delivery ratio, incurred delay and network lifetime.