Sleeping Multipath Routing: A Trade-Off between Reliability and Lifetime in Wireless Sensor Networks

In wireless sensor networks, multipath routing is used to alleviate reliability degradation due to multihop transmissions over error-prone wireless channels. However, multipath routing is not energy-efficient, as it requires all the nodes in the network to always be awake. To prolong the network lifetime while maintaining a certain reliability performance, we propose Sleeping Multipath Routing, which selects the minimum number of disjoint paths to achieve a given reliability requirement and puts the rest of the network to sleep. Simulation results show that Sleeping Multipath Routing can significantly extend the network lifetime, and it can trade off reliability for lifetime.