LIEMRO: A Low-Interference Energy-Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol for Improving QoS in Event-Based Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

In the recent years, multipath routing techniques are recognized as an effective approach to improve QoS in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs). However, in most of the previously proposed protocols either the effects of inter-path interference are ignored, or establishing low-interference paths is very costly. In this paper, we propose a Low-Interference Energy-efficient Multipath ROuting protocol (LIEMRO) for WSNs. This protocol is mainly designed to improve packet delivery ratio, lifetime, and latency, through discovering multiple interference-minimized node-disjoint paths between source node and sink node. In addition, LIEMRO includes a load balancing algorithm to distribute source node's traffic over multiple paths based on the relative quality of each path. Simulation results show that using LIEMRO in high traffic load conditions can increase data reception rate and network lifetime even more than 1.5x compared with single path routing approach, while end-to-end latency reduces significantly. Accordingly, LIEMRO is a multipath solution for event-driven applications in which lifetime, reliability, and latency are of great importance.