Energy-Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol for Supporting Mobile Events in Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks have been researched to gather data about events on sensor fields from sources at sinks. Multipath routing is one of attractive approaches to reliably send data against the problem of frequent breakages on paths from sources to sinks due to node and link failures. As mobile events such as humans, animals, and vehicles are considered, sources may be continuously generated according to the movement of the mobile event. Thus, mobile events provide new challenging issue in multipath routing. However, the research on multipath routing mainly focus on both efficient multipath construction from sources to static sinks and fast multipath reconstruction against path breakages. Accordingly, the previous multipath routing protocols request each source continuously generated by a mobile event to construct individual multipath from the source to sinks. This induces the increase of multipath construction cost in the previous protocols in proportion to the number of source. Therefore, we propose efficient multipath routing protocol for supporting continuous sources generated by mobile events. In the proposed protocol, new source efficiently reconstructs its multipath by exploiting the existing multipath of previous sources. To do this, the proposed protocol selects one among three reconstruction methods: a local reconstruction, a global partial one, and a global full one. For a selection decision, we provide an analytical energy consumption cost model that calculates the summation of both the multipath reconstruction cost and the data forwarding cost. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has better performance than the previous protocol to provide multipath routing for mobile events.