A Multipath Prefix Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

When a spanning tree is built on top of a wireless network and an appropriate labelling scheme is applied, the complexity of the routing mechanism in terms of memory usage and control messages can be drastically reduced using compact routing. In this paper, we propose multipath prefix routing (MPR), a multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks. MPR is a hybrid (both reactive and proactive) protocol that operates on an already built spanning tree rooted at the sink (the collect station). Besides the tree path, additional paths are built based on an appropriate labelling scheme and neighbourhood relationships. For practical implementation, we propose and evaluate two different labelling schemes. We mainly show that in a perfect W-ary tree, the additional number of bits required to encode labels is at most where H is the height of the tree. Finally, we apply MPR to the ZigBee standard and evaluate its performance using simulations. MPR has a small state routing while control messages overhead is maintained low compared to traditional multipath routing protocols.