Title: A multipath QoS routing protocol in wireless sensor networks

Authors: Yunfeng Chen, Nidal Nasser, Tarek El Salti, Hongdong Zhang

Addresses: Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ' Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ' Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada. ' Department of Computing and Information Science, University of Guelph, Guelph, Ontario N1G 2W1, Canada

Abstract: Most of the proposed routing protocols for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) concentrate on efficiently using constrained resources, especially the energy. However, one important factor of the routing protocols, QoS routing, has not been paid enough attention. Transmission collision appears frequently at nodes that receive packets from multiple nodes. Consequently, the network performance is greatly reduced. Furthermore, frequent collisions increase delay, which is important to real-time applications. The services provided by the sensor network are also impacted. In this paper, we propose a mechanism to find multiple paths between one sink and multiple sources with the consideration of reducing collision. We take advantage of the mass deployment of sensor nodes to search for disjoint paths for multiple source nodes in order to avoid collisions. Besides the increase in the network lifetime and throughput, the protocol also decreases the latency. Simulation results are provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of our solution.

Keywords: QoS routing; quality of service; multipath routing; wireless sensor networks; WSNs; wireless networks; collision avoidance; disjoint paths; simulation; network lifetime; throughput; latency.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSNET.2010.033204

International Journal of Sensor Networks, 2010 Vol.7 No.4, pp.207 - 216

Published online: 13 May 2010 *

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