Traffic Splitting Protocol for Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

One of the most important reasons for using Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is increasing the WSN life span. The increase in the WSN life span is a result of evenly distributing the load on all discovered routes. This is because; using a single route in a WSN would deplete the limited energy resources of the involved nodes. This would cause premature death of the most used nodes, fragmentation of the WSN and a non-functional network. As a result, it is of great importance to evenly allocate traffic to all discovered routes in a WSN to increase the network life time expectancy. In this paper, four network factors and the mathematical framework to calculate them is proposed. Also, a Traffic Splitting Protocol integrated with the network factors is introduced.