Event Triggered Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

Reliable communication, optimal usage of energy and bandwidth are the critical issues in wireless sensor networks (WSNs). Efficient utilization of WSN resources prolongs the network life time. In this paper, we propose an event triggered multipath routing algorithm for WSNs. The proposed scheme operates in the following steps. (1) The sensor node (first sensed) that detects an event (called as event node) triggers multiple path discovery from itself to the sink node. (2) Event node initiates the route initialization phase where it sends the beacon packet to neighbor sensor nodes. The beacon packet comprises of event type (critical/noncritical), node id, location information, residual energy, available bandwidth, and hop distance. (3) Sink node computes the node disjoint paths. (4) Sink node computes the path weight factor based on the energy efficiency, path efficiency, and bandwidth efficiency. (5) If event is noncritical, then sink node selects a path with highest weight factor (based on cost function) and sends the path information to event node. For critical information, multipath information is sent to event node. To test effectiveness of the proposed scheme, it is analyzed in terms of packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, overhead for critical and noncritical information.