Abstract
Energy efficiency is considered as an important design issue in multihop wireless networks as the nodes are battery limited. Energy efficiency can be achieved by establishing multiple paths. Multipath routing explores multiple disjoint paths between sources–sink pair in order to improve energy consumption at nodes and thus, provide robustness against possible node failure. However, it remains a challenging task in wireless networks due to associated interference. Reducing interference lowers the energy consumption, improving the network lifetime. This paper proposes an interference aware energy efficient multipath routing protocol for a given source-sink pair by a combined route construction and power allocation method. After finding k-minimum weight node disjoint paths on a weighted communication graph, iterative power allocation is performed on the derived paths considering signal to interference plus noise ratio (SINR) model. The power allocation method minimizes the interference experienced by each node at an acceptable level so that multiple transmissions can take place simultaneously. By alternatively invoking multipath route construction and power allocation method on a weighted communication graph, the proposed algorithm optimizes the assignment of transmission power and thereby minimizes the total energy consumption on k-node disjoint multipath. The simulation results show that the performance of the proposed scheme is better than existing multipath routing algorithms.