Multipath Routing using Generalized Load Sharing for Wireless Sensor Networks

摘要

Most current routing protocols work by selecting a single path to send information between a specific source destination pair. Conversely, multipath routing consists of giving a source node the possibility to use any of several paths to a particular destination at any given time. Multipath routing has several advantages as compared to single-path routing, including smoothing out the traffic, load balancing, supporting QoS, improving reliability, and enhancing the privacy of the information being sent. In wireless sensor networks (WSNs) it also has the advantage of extending the lifetime of the system by distributing more homogeneously the energy consumption among its nodes. In this paper we propose techniques that allow the application of multipath routing in a WSN environment, including methods to discover multiple routes between each sensing node and the sink, to assign a weight to each one of these routes, and to decide the path that each packet being generated by a specific sensing node will follow en route to the sink.