Opportunistic communications based on distributed width-controllable braided multipath routing in wireless sensor networks

Multipath routing, especially braided multipath routing (BMR), has become a powerful tool to provide reliable and energy-efficient packet transmissions against wireless links losses and node failures. In previous literatures, most of the construction methods of braided multipath routes are centralized and inefficient. By exploiting the broadcast nature of wireless mediums, opportunistic routings proposed recently bring much more reliability and efficiency for wireless communications. In this paper, with the idea of opportunistic routings, we propose a distributed width-controllable braided multipath routing (WC-BMR) based on local neighbor’s information for data collections in wireless sensor networks. By only attaching a little information to data packets, the transmission direction can be restricted near the main route. Heterogeneous widths, namely, different widths on different hops from the source to the sink can also be supported to adapt to the dynamic and heterogeneous wireless links. Then, to avoid packet collisions, a novel time schedule strategy is given. In terms of the reliability, delay and transmission overhead, the performance of WC-BMR is analyzed theoretically. In addition, a kind of less cooperative topology (LC-Topology) in the WC-BMR is found, which brings no or less reliability gain. And modified cooperative WC-BMR (MCWC-BMR) with the detection algorithm for LC-Topology is proposed to maintain the high reliability and efficiency, which allows parents nodes to choose the best main route locally and dynamically. Using TOSSIM platform, WC-BMR and MCWC-BMR are both evaluated with some previous baseline approaches. Simulation results reveal that both WC-BMR and MCWC-BMR, especially the latter, can achieve higher reliability and efficiency, as well as keep lower delay under various network settings.