Trade-Off between Traffic Overhead and Reliability in Multipath Routing for Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks (WSN) data produced by one or more sources usually has to be routed through several intermediate nodes to reach the destination. Problems arise when intermediate nodes fail to forward the incoming messages. The reliability of the system can be increased by providing several paths from source to destination and sending the same packet through each of them (the algorithm is known as multipath routing). Using this technique, the traffic increases significantly. In this paper, we analyze a new mechanism that enables the tradeoff between the amount of traffic and the reliability. The data packet is split in k subpackets (k = number of disjoined paths from source to destination). If only Ek subpackets (Ek < k) are necessary to rebuild the original data packet (condition obtained by adding redundancy to each subpacket), then the trade-off between traffic and reliability can be controlled.