Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol Against Path Failures in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, emergency applications such as fire alert or intruder detection are mostly needed to accomplish reliable and real-time data delivery on a path from a source to a sink. However, WSNs might have frequent path failures due to node or link failures. Thus, addressing these path failures effectively is one of very important issues. Especially, the multipath routing approach of using both the primary path and the alternative path is considered as an attractive technique to deal with path failures. However, the approach still has two issues to be addressed for enhancing network performances. The first issue is that the approach has no handling scheme for packets on the failed primary path, which reduces reliability of data packet delivery, The second issue is that the approach globally constructs a new alternative path made instead of the failure primary path from a source to a sink, which consume high energy of sensor nodes. Thus, this paper proposes a new multipath routing protocol based on a virtual line to efficiently address these two issues. Our protocol can enhance delivery reliability and reduce energy consumption by using a multipath routing structure based on a virtual line. Simulation results verified that the proposed protocol is superior to the existing protocols.