Multi-class Multipath Routing Protocol for Low Power Wireless Networks with Heuristic Optimal Load Distribution

The distributed nature and dynamic topology of hierarchical low power wireless networks have made them an interesting platform for ubiquitous applications and smart environments. Wireless Sensor and Actuator Networks are a well known example in this area where the nodes collaborate to disseminate data over multi-hop routing trees. Emerging applications like smart grids and internet of things, demand more traffic volumes with QoS requirements, such as delay and reliability. The traditional shortest path routing fails to meet these demands because of producing more congestion, delay, packet loss, and energy consumption along the limited optimal paths. Multipath routing is a promising way to meet both the QoS constraints and lifetime concerns. In this paper we propose a proactive multipath load balancing approach which tries to achieve maximum lifetime by equalizing the traffic rate between the nodes of equal distance from the local sink. The load balancing and QoS provision is achieved through a network flow optimization problem, which is locally solved by a novel Heuristic Optimal Load Distributor. The load distribution is performed over a routing graph produced by a Multi-class Multipath Routing Protocol for Low power and lossy networks ($$\hbox {M}^2\hbox {RPL}$$M2RPL). The simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed framework, that leads to 30 % increase in lifetime and 10 % decrease in average delay compared to some well known algorithms in the area.