Improving multipath data delivery and energy efficiency in few disjoint paths scenario

Multipath data transmission is an established mechanism to ensure reliable data delivery in mission critical sensor networks. Advantages of a multipath data delivery protocol can be realized if there exist large number of paths in the network. However, this is generally not the case as finding alternative paths is an expensive process. Therefore, we propose minor modifications to a basic multipath approach so that it does not require large number of multipaths. We augment multipath approach with only one per hop retransmission. Through analytical models and trace driven simulations, we show that the data delivery probability of the proposed approach is generally higher than the multipath approach. We also show that the proposed approach consumes upto 50% less energy than the basic multipath approach.