A resilient multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

Wireless sensor networks should be self-configuring, highly scalable, redundant, and robust in dealing with shifting topologies due to node failure and environment changes. The energy of a sensor node is the most important system resource, and one of the best ways of conserving energy is to distribute the routing load across all sensor nodes as much equally as possible. Considering the load balance for conserving energy, multipath routing protocols have been employed in sensor networks. In this paper we present a resilient multipath routing protocol based on AODV, named as RMRP, for wireless sensor networks. RMRP is an AODV-based multipath routing protocol in which sensor nodes setup double routing paths toward sink nodes in an AODV fashion and select one of them randomly for forwarding a packet. RMRP proposes a resilient route maintenance scheme which repairs broken links by utilizing localized information around neighbor nodes of the broken link, thereby reducing the flooding range of control messages. To show the effectiveness of the proposed route maintenance scheme, we evaluate the performance enhancement of the proposed scheme by ns2-based simulation.