An Energy-Efficient Optimal Multipath Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

The significant goal of routing protocol designs for wireless sensor networks is to improve the utilization rate of nodes and to prolong the lifetime of the network. But to a specific application, some other network performances, such as robustness, reliability, end-to-end delay, should be concerned and the conventional single path schemes may not be optimal to improve all these performances efficiently. In this paper, we propose a distributed energy-efficient optimal multipath routing protocol to find maximum multiple paths between the sink and the nodes, which would improve the network performance to a great extent. Compared our proposed scheme with the directed diffusion routing protocol, the simulation results reveal that our scheme has longer network lifetime, higher reliability, lower end-to-end delay and control overhead.