Energy Efficient Collision Aware Multipath Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

Multipath routing can reduce the need for route updates, balance the traffic load and increase the data transfer rate in a wireless sensor network, improving the utilization of the limited energy of sensor nodes. However, previous multiple path routing methods use flooding for route discovery and transmit data with maximum power regardless of need, which results in waste of energy. Moreover, often a serious problem of collisions among multiple paths arises. In this paper, we propose an energy efficient and collision aware (EECA) node-disjoint multipath routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks. With the aid of node position information, the EECA algorithm attempts to find two collision-free routes using constrained and power adjusted flooding and then transmits the data with minimum power needed through power control component of the protocol. Our preliminary simulation results show that ECCA algorithm results in good overall performance, saving energy and transferring data efficiently.