K-Multipath Routing Mechanism with Load Balancing in Wireless Sensor Networks

It is desirable to allow packets with the same source and destination to take more than one possible path. This facility can be used to ease congestion and overcome node failures. In this paper, we design and implement a k-multipath routing algorithm that allows a given source node send samples of data to a given sink node in a large scale sensor networks. Multipath routing can increase endto-end throughput and provide load balancing. However, its advantage is not obvious in wireless sensor networks because the traffic along the multiple paths will interfere with each other. Our multipath routing algorithm tries to keep multipath as node disjoint routes. In order to achieve a minimum mean delay for the whole network, we study the two different policies with which we distribute traffic over different paths. The simulation results reveal that our multipath routing approach does not surprisingly perform better than the shortest path routing (single path routing SPR) in terms of load balancing and quality of data (QoD).