IM2PR: interference-minimized multipath routing protocol for wireless sensor networks

With respect to the inherent advantages of multipath routing, nowadays multipath routing is known as an efficient mechanism to provide even network resource utilization and efficient data transmission in different networks. In this context, several multipath routing protocols have been developed over the past years. However, due to the time-varying characteristics of low-power wireless communications and broadcast nature of radio channel, performance benefits of traffic distribution over multiple paths in wireless sensor networks are less obvious. Motivated by the drawbacks of the existing multipath routing protocols, this paper presents an Interference-Minimized MultiPath Routing protocol (IM2PR) which aims to discover a sufficient number of minimum interfering paths with high data transmission quality between each event area and sink node in order to provide efficient event data packet forwarding in event-driven wireless sensor networks. Extensive performance evaluations show that IM2PR presents improvements over the Micro Sensor Multipath Routing Protocol (MSMRP) and Energy-Efficient data Routing Protocol (EERP) as follows: 50% and 70% in term of packet reception ratio at the sink, 44% and 80% in term of goodput, 33% and 40% in term of packet delivery latency, 40% and 57% in term of energy consumption, 50% and 60% in term of packet delivery overhead.