A Scalable Priority-Based Multi-Path Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

In this paper, a scalable priority-based multi-path routing protocol (PRIMP) is proposed for wireless sensor networks to offer extended network lifetime and robust network fault tolerance, under the context of stringent energy constraint and vulnerability of sensors to dynamic environmental conditions. A novel interest dissemination strategy which invokes an on-demand virtual source technique is designed in PRIMP to minimize communication overheads and energy wastage. In routing, data traffic is distributed over multiple braided data paths simultaneously by a priority-based probabilistic approach at each hop to achieve the robustness against the unreliable transmission due to frequent node failures. Extensive simulations validate that PRIMP exhibits significantly better performance in energy conservation, load-balancing and data delivery than comparable schemes, while at the same time PRIMP achieves a nice scalability feature in terms of energy dissipation with various network sizes and network densities. Last but not least, PRIMP addresses the slow startup problem that is prevalent in data-centric routing schemes.