Multipath Energy-Aware Routing Protocol in Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, we present an energy efficient, scalable, and distributed node disjoint multipath routing algorithm for wireless sensor networks (WSNs). The proposed algorithm, the multipath energy-aware routing protocol (MERP), adjusts traffic flows via a novel load balancing scheme. The MERP has a higher average node energy efficiency, lower control overhead, and a shorter average delay than those of well-known previous works. Moreover, since MERP takes into consideration network reliability, it is useful for delivering data in unreliable environments.