Node disjoint multi-path routing for ZigBee cluster-tree wireless sensor networks

ZigBee is the emerging industrial standard for Ad hoc networks based on the IEEE 802.15.4 physical and MAC layers standard. It was originally specified for low data rate, low power consumption and low cost wireless personal area networks (WPANs). Due to these characteristics, ZigBee is expected to be used in wireless sensor networks (WSNs) for industrial sensing and control applications. Handling high data rate applications, such video surveillance in WPANs is a real challenge. To increase available bandwidth in a ZigBee network, we explore in this paper, multipath routing where multiple paths are used simultaneously to transfer data between a source and the sink. We propose Z-MHTR, a node disjoint multipath routing extension of the ZigBee hierarchical tree routing protocol in cluster-tree WSN. The aim of this work is to study and evaluate the implemented multipath routing using NS2 simulations. We mainly faced some problems that influence the efficiency of the multipath routing and the overall network performances in terms of throughput, end to end delay data transmission and network lifetime under heavy and low data rates.