Multipath routing for cluster-based and event-based protocols in wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) that consists of a large number of small sensing self-powered nodes is a promising approach for a variety of applications. Possible applications of WSN are of interest to the most diverse fields: environmental monitoring, warfare, child education, surveillance, micro-surgery and agriculture are only few examples. Due to limited power of sensor nodes that are distributed in a large geographical area, the WSN requires robust but simple, scalable, energy-efficient and also self-configurable routing algorithms. From these characteristics, WSN routing protocol can coarsely be classified in two main classes: flat and hierarchical approaches. Hierarchical solution (also called cluster-based) separates nodes in clusters and the communication within clusters is possible only through the selected leaders or Cluster Head-CH. In the reality, it is not always necessary to divide all the network to clusters because one event can only appear in a small part. In this case, routing protocol needs to form only one cluster with one CH for minimizing the amount of data sending to the base station (BS). Some such routing approaches (called cluster-based and event-based) are proposed as ARPEES [1], OEDSR [2], HPEQ[3]... but they all create only one optimal route from CH to the BS and this route can be broken when the sensor node's power is negligible. In this paper, we propose two multipath solutions called Multiparth ARPEES (MARPEES) and Energy Aware Mesh Routing Protocol (EMRP) for ensuring reliable and fault-tolerance data transmission while balancing node's energy consumption in the network and minimizing the control overhead. The simulation results show that our solutions achieve better performance than other cluster-based and event-based routing protocols.