An Energy Efficient Fault Tolerant Multipath (EEFTM) Routing Protocol for Wireless Sensor Networks

Currently, there is very little research that aims at handling QoS requirements using multipath routing in a very energy constrained environment like sensor networks. In this paper, energy efficient fault-tolerant multipath routing technique which utilizes multiple paths between source and the sink. has been proposed. This protocol is intended to provide a reliable transmission environment with low energy consumption, by efficiently utilizing the energy availability and the available bandwidth of the nodes to identify multiple routes to the destination. To achieve reliability and fault tolerance, this protocol selects reliable paths based on the average reliability rank (ARR) of the paths. Average reliability rank of a path is based on each node´s reliability rank (RR), which represents the probability that a node correctly delivers data to the destination. In case the existing route encounters some unexpected link or route failure, the algorithm selects the path with the next highest ARR, from the list of selected paths. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol minimizes the energy and latency and maximizes the delivery ratio.