Multipath Routing for Data Dissemination in Energy Efficient Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN) data produced by one or more sources usually has to be routed through several intermediate nodes to reach the destination. Problems arise when intermediate nodes fail to forward incoming messages. We increase the reliability of the system by providing a new routing mechanism that specifically takes into consideration possible failures on the communication paths. The new algorithm computes several paths from the data source to the destination and sends, over each path, a fragment of the initial data. Only k fragments of the total n fragments (k less than n) are necessary to build the initial data packet. The path construction is based on the reputation coefficients of the nodes, computed on how the nodes acted in the past sensor networks. It addresses the convergence of distributed information processing, wireless communication and mobile computing.