Energy Efficient and Congestion Control Multipath Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

An important factor concerning routing protocol in wireless sensor networks is energy consumption. Single path routing protocols are not optimal in maximizing network lifetime. An energy efficient cost function used in multipath routing protocol that maximizes network lifetime using minimum energy path is proposed. Multipath routing protocol splits the load among multiple paths instead of routing all traffic along a single path. Here the paths with minimum energy are discovered and out of the discovered paths, required paths are selected. The protocol uses a least cost path in terms of cost function that calculates node’s transmission energy, residual energy, and buffer space and signal strength threshold. The cost function is used to find the next preferred hop through the path construction phase. A primary path and alternate path is discovered using cost function and data is transmitted. If a node in selected path has high utilized buffer ratio and the residual energy of nodes in selected paths are different, there is a chance of congestion in the paths. Consequently the network can avoid congestion by assigning traffic to different paths. When congestion is occurred, it can help to detect congestion by using the values of transmitting capacity and alleviate congestion by reassigning traffic. The results of simulations validate that the proposed energy efficient and congestion control mechanism can avoid and alleviate congestion, and has reasonable effects of low energy consumption and high throughput.