Energy Efficient Multipath Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks: A Genetic Algorithm Approach

Energy efficiency and fault tolerance are the two most important factors that must be considered for deployment of any Wireless Sensor Network (WSN). Multipath routing is an efficient solution for the fault tolerance of WSNs. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for multipath routing in WSNs which is also energy efficient. The proposed algorithm is based on the popular meta-heuristic technique Genetic Algorithm (GA). In the proposed algorithm, routing schedule is prepared at the base station (BS) which share it with all the nodes of the entire network. The proposed algorithm has an efficient fitness function which is derived with various parameters such as the distance between sender and receiver nodes, the distance between next hop node to the BS and also on the number of hop to send data from next hop node to the BS. The proposed algorithm is tested through simulation and evaluated with various performance metrics.