Radio-disjoint multipath routing with dynamic guard-band shifting in wireless sensor networks

A guard-band is used to prevent collision between paths in multipath routing protocols. However, problems such as traffic congestion, reduced lifetime, and void occurrence arise because existing protocols do not exploit the guard-band during packet transmission, but only transfer packets on the same path. To solve these problems, we propose radio-disjoint multipath routing that consists of guard-band shifting and balanced node selection. The proposed scheme transfers a packet on the constructed path and alternatively, into the guard-band area. In addition, the intermediate node is selected according to link quality and remaining energy, so all of the nodes involving packet transmission can be exploited equally. Through a performance evaluation, we demonstrate that the proposed scheme achieves a higher packet delivery ratio and prolongs the average network lifetime by at least 31% and up to approximately 99% compared with existing routing protocols, under the condition of a 90% link success ratio.