Statistical Signal Strength Aware Multipath Routing Protocol

The immense potential of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has created a growing awareness of the need for reliability and energy efficiency in such networks. Reliability and energy efficiency are not independent of each other as reliability may be achieved, at the cost of energy, by retransmitting packets. Major reason behind loss of packet in a WSN is collision. Since all transmissions take place at standard signal strength, there are major chances that the signal is strong enough to surpass the destination nodes and collide with another packet that is being transmitted beyond the target node. As the power consumption of a node increases with the strength of signal every time a node transmits at higher power, energy is wasted and the phenomenon ends up decreasing the overall life time of the network. Also all packets in a network need not require the same level of reliability. In this paper we argue that the a higher packet delivery rate may be provided by considering the strength of the signal being transmitted while increasing the overall life time of the network by making more uniform resource utilization. We introduce SSsAMPr (statistical signal strength aware multipath routing) which is a statistical approach that attempts to evenly distribute the energy consumption over a large part of network and provide high reliability by taking signal strength in to consideration. At the end we compare SSsAMPr with conventional routing protocol and show that SSsAMPr provides a high variation in number of nodes participating in routing of packet thus providing a method to vary the energy consumption and reliability of the network.