Multiple shortest path routing (MSPR) in wireless sensor networks

A wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of a collection of cooperative sensors which monitor environmental conditions such as temperature, sound and motion. Each sensor processes the measured data and communicates it to other sensors or the base station via multi-hop routing. Routing in wireless sensor networks has been a challenging research problem for years due to the resource constraints of sensors and the dynamic, ad hoc network topologies. In this paper, we proposed a multipath routing scheme which can discover multiple shortest paths between sensors and base station without using a global addressing scheme to assign an identifier to each sensor. Our proposed routing scheme discovers the shortest paths (in terms of number of hops) so that the energy consumption for data transmission is reduced. With limited overhead, multiple shortest paths are maintained so as to increase the resilience to node failures in WSNs.