A Hierarchical Multipath Routing Protocol in Clustered Wireless Sensor Networks

Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) usually consist of many tiny sensor nodes and a Sink; despite the great variety of their applications, they are faced with many problems like limited resources, low Quality of Service such as low reliability and fault tolerance, low throughput, low scalability and insecure operational environments. It significantly degrades their overall performance. One significant solution against mentioning problems is multipath routing; but, existing multipath routing protocols have weaknesses like high overhead and resources’ severe consumed, low accuracy, security vulnerabilities, low scalability and permanent usage of optimal paths. As a result, this paper proposes a hierarchical multipath routing protocol for homogeneous and clustered WSNs, called HMR-WSN. Finally, its performance is compared with the performance of HMR-LEACH routing protocol; results of algorithmic-complexity and statistical-simulation analyses show HMR-WSN is improved in terms of energy consumption, the average rate of packet delivery, throughput and accuracy. But, its performance is proportionally degraded in terms of average of route setup time, routing overhead and computational simplicity.