Summary: | Unlike conventional wireless cellular networks, the energy efficiency is a critical design
issue for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Many works have been done to design routing
protocols that allow the sensors to distribute data efficiently with limited energy supply.
In this thesis, we propose a novel routing algorithm to disseminate information via
multiple paths in static and energy-constrained WSNs. The algorithm consists of a
distributed multipath search protocol and a load balancing algorithm. The multipath
search protocol discovers multiple node-disjoint paths that connect a pair of sink and
source nodes. The load balancing algorithm helps the sink node to allocate traffic over
multiple paths found based on their cost, which depends on the energy levels and the
hop distances of nodes along each path. We consider it as a key to improve the energy
efficiency in our protocol.
The results based on the use of ns-2 simulator show that our algorithm can prolong the
network lifetime by 9% to 18% and reduce the node energy consumption by a maximum of
34% over comparable schemes, including the energy-aware routing, the directed diffusion,
and the directed transmission. The results also indicate that the multipath routing has
low control message overhead and incurs a small data packet transfer delay. === Applied Science, Faculty of === Electrical and Computer Engineering, Department of === Graduate
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