Energy efficient multipath routing for wireless sensor networks

Sensor nodes in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are energy constrained. So, one of the major design challenges in WSN is minimizing consumed energy at the sensor nodes. Therefore, a number of routing schemes are designed that make efficient use of limited energy of the sensor nodes. These schemes typically use lowest energy path for data transmission. It has been observed that utilization of same path is not optimal as considered for network lifetime. Therefore, we propose a new scheme called balanced routing scheme, which transmit through multiple routes. The proposed routing scheme keeps a set of multiple paths depending on its weightage. However, weightage of the paths are decided from its proportion of utilization. The main objective of this paper is to implement balanced routing in simulator NS-2. In addition to this, performance of balanced routing is compared with the basic routing scheme, expected transmission count (ETX) scheme on the basis of energy consumption at the greediest sensor nodes. The result shows that, compared with ETX routing scheme, balanced routing scheme improves network lifetime by minimizing consumed energy at the nodes.