Carrier sense range effect on multipath routing performances in Wireless Sensor Networks

In the recent years, Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) have become a great field of interest for scientific community. This kind of network provides a panoply of applications in different areas of human life. However WSNs must ensure the quality of service (QoS) to give the requested performance for the final user. Among different issues presented in the literature to provide high QoS, multipath routing is commonly used. But such a solution could be not enough efficient if the multipath routing design does not consider the phenomena of interference. Indeed the constructed paths can have an interference zone, mainly a shared carrier sense range. In this paper we show by analytical and experimental results, that using multipath routing can never overshoot the performance of single path when the interferences are not taken into account. Also, we show how the carrier sense range can influence the network performance.