An energy-efficient load-balanceable multipath routing algorithm based on AHP for wireless sensor networks

As a key design criterion for the routing protocols in wireless sensor network, energy consumption is an important factor which affects network lifetime. Some of the conventional routing schemes may not be optimal to maximize the network lifetime. In this paper, we propose a multipath routing algorithm (MRA-AHP) with flexible application relativity on the basis of Directed Diffusion. The algorithm establishes multiple paths from the source node to the destination node. According to the residual energy of the neighbor node, the transmission delay and bandwidth of the link to that neighbor, each neighbor node can be given a selection weight for the next relay node selection, which makes multiple paths of better performance. We also propose a load balancing scheme to distribute the traffic over the multiple paths discovered. Both the next hop selection algorithm and load balancing scheme apply Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP).At last, we simulate our multipath routing scheme on the NS2, and compare it with DD and HREEMR routing algorithms. The simulation results indicate that our proposed routing algorithm effectively extends network lifetime and has a good performance on node average energy consumption and average transmission delay.