A multipath routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks

Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) is expected to have a significant impact on the efficiency of military and civil applications such as target field imaging, intrusion detection, weather monitoring. Sensors with low cost, low power and multifunction are expected to last until their energy drains, so energy-conserving forms of communication and computation are essential to the sensor node lifetime. Given the unreliable nature of the wireless channel and the high failure rate of the individual sensors, a fault tolerant routing protocol with energy-efficiency is expected to overcome these problems. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient multipath routing algorithm (EMRA) for wireless sensor networks. EMRA can efficiently find a disjoint multipath and provide a protection for routing failure. From the observed results, EMRA performs well in terms of average dissipated energy and delay to set up backup path.