Multipath Routing with Erasure Coding for Wireless Sensor Networks

Multipath routing algorithm in wireless sensor networks (WSN) increase the reliability of the system at the cost of significantly increased traffic. This paper introduces a splitted multipath routing scheme to improve the reliability of data routing in WSN by keeping the traffic at a low level. Our proposed on-demand multipah routing algorithm offers the data source several paths to any destination. It is used in combination with a data splitting method based on Erasure Coding. The algorithms presented in this paper assures that the gathered data will reach its destination in the network by assuming as a regular fact that nodes may be not available during the routing procedure. Additional energy will be required only for a small amount of computations; this is almost negligible compared with the energy used for communications. It greatly increases the reliability of packet delivery in wireless sensor network, while keep the total network traffic much lower than the traditional multipath routing. At the same time the latency of splitted mulitpath routing is shorter than any retransmission scheme. Keywords— wireless sensor network, multipath routing, reliability, mobility, erasure code