Statistical Energy Efficient Multipath Routing Protocol

The main purpose of a sensor network is to gather information about the environment or object they are sensing and deliver it to the end user. Therefore, the quantity and quality of the data delivered to the end-user is very important. The immense potential of wireless sensor networks (WSNs) has created a growing awareness of the need for reliability in such networks. Another major concern in the design of WSN protocols is energy efficiency. Reliability and energy efficiency are not independent of each other as reliability may be achieved by retransmitting packets. Thus there exists a trade off between reliability and energy efficiency; reliability may be increased at the cost of higher energy consumption. Thus conventional protocols face a threshold beyond which life time of network cannot be increased for a given required reliability. But all packets in a network need not require the same level of reliability. In this paper we argue that the overall life time of the network can be increased by making a more uniform resource utilization which in turn can be achieved by shaping the traffic flow. We introduce SEEMPr (statistical energy efficient multipath routing) which is a statistical approach that attempts to evenly distribute the energy consumption over a large part of network while maintaining the reliability of the network by choosing a route based on urgency of the message. At the end we compare SEEMPr with conventional routing protocol and show that SEEMPr provides a high variation in number of nodes participating in routing of packet thus providing a method to vary the energy consumption and reliability of the network.