Interference-minimized multipath routing with congestion control in wireless sensor network for high-rate streaming

Abstract

High-rate streaming in WSN is required for future applications to provide high-quality information of battlefield hot spots. Although recent advances have enabled large-scale WSN to be deployed supported by high-bandwidth backbone network for high-rate streaming, the WSN remains the bottleneck due to the low-rate radios used and the effects of wireless interferences. First, we propose a technique to evaluate the quality of a path set for multlpath load balancing, taking Into consideration the effects of wireless interferences and that nodes may interfere beyond communication ranges. Second, we propose an Interference-Minimized Multipath Routing (I2MR) protocol that increases throughput by discovering zone-disjoint paths for load balancing, requiring minimal localization support. Third, we propose a congestion control scheme that further increases throughput by loading the paths for load balancing at the highest possible rate supportable. Finally, we validate the path-set evaluation technique and also evaluate the I2MR protocol and congestion control scheme by comparing with AODV protocol and Node-Disjoint Multipath Routing (NDMR) protocol. Simulation results show that I2MR with congestion control achieves on average 230 percent and 150 percent gains in throughput over AODV and NDMR, respectively, and consumes comparable or at most 24 percent more energy than AODV but up to 60 percent less energy than NDMR. © 2008 IEEE.