Geographic energy-aware non-interfering multipath routing for multimedia transmission in wireless sensor networks

Abstract Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks (WMSN) have been drawing considerable attention and discussion in recent years due to its potential applications in various fields. For WMSN, how to increase the throughput in constrained environments has become the main challenge. Multipath routing is a promising solution because it can improve the channel utilization rate, reduce transmission delay and balance the transmission load. To pursue high efficiency for a multipath routing scheme, we need to take the characteristics of wireless environments and sensor networks into careful considerations. Based on such considerations, this paper introduces a Geographic Energy-Aware non-interfering Multipath (GEAM) routing scheme which divides the whole network topology into many districts and simultaneously forwards data through these districts without interfering with each other – to achieve interference-free transmissions. Our scheme will adjust the load of each district according to the energy status of their nodes; it does not establish fixed paths in advance and will hence maintain high performance even when the topology changes rapidly. We meanwhile employ a simple way to deal with the hole problem. Simulation results show that, when compared with related routing schemes, our GEAM can achieve higher performance at real-time transmission and meanwhile distribute transmission loads more evenly to most of the nodes in the network.