A Routing Approach for Constructing Braided Multipath to Alleviate Congestion in WSNs

Abstract In recent years many versatile applications have been developed on wireless sensor networks (WSNs) that consist of various types of sensors. Thus, the issues of the WSN technology have become hot topics for WSN research. One of the hot topics is congestion alleviation for WSNs. A Topology- Aware Resource Adaptation (TARA) approach was developed to alleviate the congestion in intersection hot spot. The TARA approach reacts to the congestion by creating a detour path after the congestion was detected. Therefore, the congestion is resolved slowly due to accumulated data packets. In order to resolve the congestion in the WSN quickly, a braided multipath routing (BMR) approach was proposed, in this paper, to alleviate network congestion. The BMR approach can create braided multiple paths before congestion occurs. Thereafter, as congestion is detected the traffic can be rerouted to another braided path. Simulation study was conducted to evaluate the BMR approach. The simulation results show that the BMR approach alleviates congestion in WSNs quickly and provides better protection ability by using less extra nodes and links than other approaches.