Multipath Routing for Dual-Radio Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The design of traditional wireless sensor networks prioritized reducing the cost, the energy consumption and memory usage at the expense of the throughput, but modern applications require using cameras and transmitting video data through the network. In this work, we propose a multipath routing algorithm to find two disjoint paths with the same parity between a pair of nodes in a dual-radio wireless sensor network. Combined with a forwarding scheme that alternates the radios throughout the paths, it allows all nodes in the paths to use both radios in parallel, doubling the throughput. We evaluated our algorithm and forwarding scheme in a real world testbed and we were able to double the throughput when compared with FastForward, the state-of-the-art protocol for dual-radio platforms, and achieve up to 96% of the theoretical limit.