Disjoint Multipath Routing to Two Distinct Drains in a Multi-Drain Sensor Network

Wireless sensor networks (WSN) are typically employed for monitoring applications that require data collection at specific nodes, called drains. In order to improve the robustness of data collection, multiple drains may be employed. Data from every sensor is required to be logged into two distinct sensors for data collection to be resilient to any single drain failures. In this paper, we develop a routing mechanism based on colored trees. Every node forwards the packets based on the drain address and one additional bit. The number of routing table entries at each node is 2|D|, where |D| denotes the number of drains in the network. The construction of the colored trees guarantees that every node has two node-disjoint paths to two distinct drains. The running time complexity of the algorithm is O(|D||L|), where |L| denotes the number of links in the network. Through extensive simulations, we demonstrate that employing multiple drains and disjoint routing to two distinct drains reduces the average path length compared to disjoint routing to one of the multiple drains.