Energy-Efficient and Disjoint Multipath Using Face Routing in Wireless Sensor Networks

In WSNs, multipath is well-known as a method to improve the reliability of packet delivery by making multiple routes from a source node to a destination node. To improve reliability and load-balancing, it is important to ensure that disjoint characteristics of multipath do not use same nodes during path generation. However, when multipath studies encounter a hole area from which is hard to transmit data packets, they have a problem with breaking the disjoint features of multipath. Although existing studies propose various strategies to bypass hole areas, they have side effects that significantly accelerate energy consumption and packet transmission delay. Therefore, to retain the disjoint feature of multipath, we propose a new scheme that can reduce delay and energy consumption for a node near a hole area using two approaches—global joint avoidance and local avoidance. This scheme uses global joint avoidance to generate a new path centered on a hole area and effectively bypasses the hole area. This scheme also uses local joint avoidance that does not select the same nodes during new path generation using a marking process. In simulations, the proposed scheme has an average 30% improvement in terms of average energy consumption and delay time compared to other studies.