J. Parallel Distrib. Comput.

70 (2010) 849–857

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

J. Parallel Distrib. Comput.

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jpdc

Energy efficient and QoS based routing protocol for wireless sensor networks
Jalel Ben-Othman ∗ , Bashir Yahya
Department of Computer Science, PRiSM Laboratory, University of Versailles Saint Quentin, 45 Avenue des Etats-Unis, 78000 Versailles, France

article info abstract

Article history: The increasing demand for real-time applications in Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) has made the
Received 15 November 2009 Quality of Service (QoS) based communication protocols an interesting and hot research topic. Satisfying
Received in revised form Quality of Service (QoS) requirements (e.g. bandwidth and delay constraints) for the different QoS based
3 February 2010
applications of WSNs raises significant challenges. More precisely, the networking protocols need to cope
Accepted 27 February 2010
Available online 17 March 2010
up with energy constraints, while providing precise QoS guarantee. Therefore, enabling QoS applications
in sensor networks requires energy and QoS awareness in different layers of the protocol stack. In many
Keywords:
of these applications (such as multimedia applications, or real-time and mission critical applications),
Multipath routing the network traffic is mixed of delay sensitive and delay tolerant traffic. Hence, QoS routing becomes
Energy efficiency an important issue. In this paper, we propose an Energy Efficient and QoS aware multipath routing
Quality of Service protocol (abbreviated shortly as EQSR) that maximizes the network lifetime through balancing energy
Forward error correction consumption across multiple nodes, uses the concept of service differentiation to allow delay sensitive
Wireless sensor networks traffic to reach the sink node within an acceptable delay, reduces the end to end delay through spreading
out the traffic across multiple paths, and increases the throughput through introducing data redundancy.
EQSR uses the residual energy, node available buffer size, and Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to predict the
best next hop through the paths construction phase. Based on the concept of service differentiation, EQSR
protocol employs a queuing model to handle both real-time and non-real-time traffic.
By means of simulations, we evaluate and compare the performance of our routing protocol with the
MCMP (Multi-Constraint Multi-Path) routing protocol. Simulation results have shown that our protocol
achieves lower average delay, more energy savings, and higher packet delivery ratio than the MCMP
protocol.
© 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction A typical WSN consists of a number of sensor devices that

In the recent years, the rapid technological advances in micro-
electro-mechanical systems, low power and highly integrated dig-
ital electronics, small scale energy supplies, tiny microprocessors,
and low power radio technologies have created low power, low
cost and multifunctional wireless sensor devices, which can ob-
serve and react to changes in physical phenomena of their sur-
rounding environments. These sensor devices are equipped with
a small battery, a tiny microprocessor, a radio transceiver, and a
set of transducers that used to acquire information that reflect the
changes in the surrounding environment of the sensor node. The
emergence of these low cost and small size wireless sensor devices
has motivated intensive research in the last decade addressing the
potential of collaboration among sensors in data gathering and pro-
cessing, which led to the invention of Wireless Sensor Networks
(WSNs).
∗ Corresponding author.
E-mail addresses: jbo@prism.uvsq.fr (J. Ben-Othman), baya@prism.uvsq.fr
(B. Yahya).
0743-7315/$ – see front matter © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.jpdc.2010.02.010
collaborate with each other to accomplish a common task
(e.g. environment monitoring, object tracking, etc.) and report the
collected data through wireless interface to a center node (sink
node). The areas of applications of WSNs vary from civil, health-
care, and environmental to military. Examples of applications in-
clude target tracking in battlefields [7], habitat monitoring [18],
civil structure monitoring [28], forest fire detection [13], and fac-
tory maintenance [24].
However, with the specific consideration of the unique proper-
ties of sensor networks such limited power, stringent bandwidth,
dynamic topology (due to node failures, adding/removing nodes, or
even physical mobility), high network density and large scale de-
ployments have posed many challenges in the design and manage-
ment of sensor networks. These challenges have demanded energy
awareness and robust protocol designs at all layers of the network-
ing protocol stack [29].
Efficient utilization of sensor’s energy resources and maximiz-
ing the network lifetime were and still are the main design consid-
erations for the most proposed protocols and algorithms for sensor
networks and have dominated most of the research in WSNs. How-
ever, depending on the type of application, the generated sensory
850 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857
data normally have different attributes, where it may contain delay
sensitive and delay tolerant data. For example, the data generated
by a sensor network that monitors the temperature in a normal
weather monitoring station are not required to be received by the
processing center or the sink node within certain time limits. On
the other hand, for a sensor network that used for fire detection in a
forest, any sensed data that carries an indication of a fire should be
reported to the processing center within certain time limits. Fur-
thermore, the introduction of multimedia sensor networks along
with the increasing interest in real-time applications have made
strict constraints on both delay and throughput in order to report
the time-critical data (in such applications) to the processing cen-
ter or sink within certain time limits and bandwidth requirements
without any loss. These performance metrics (i.e. delay and band-
width) are usually referred to as Quality of Service (QoS) require-
ments [1]. Therefore, enabling real-time applications in sensor
networks requires energy and QoS awareness in different layers
of the protocol stack in order to have efficient utilization of the
network resources and effective access to sensors readings. Thus
QoS routing is an important topic in sensor networks research, and
it has been under the focus of the research community of WSNs.
Refer to References [1,8] for surveys on Quality of Service based
routing protocols for WSNs.
Many routing solutions specifically designed for WSNs have
been proposed [3,20]. In these proposals, the unique properties
of the WSNs have been taken into account. These routing
techniques can be classified according to the protocol operation
into negotiation based, query based, QoS based, and multi-path based.
The negotiation based protocols have the objective to eliminate
the redundant data by include high level data descriptors in the
message exchange. In query based protocols, the sink node initiates
the communication by broadcasting a query for data over the
network. The QoS based protocols allow sensor nodes to make a
tradeoff between the energy consumption and some QoS metrics
before delivering the data to the sink node [21]. Finally, multi-
path routing protocols use multiple paths rather than a single
path in order to improve the network performance in terms of
reliability and robustness. Multi-path routing establishes multiple
paths between the source–destination pair. Multi-path routing
protocols have been discussed in the literature for several years
now [25]. Multi-path routing has focused on the use of multiple
paths primarily for load balancing, fault tolerance, bandwidth
aggregation, and reduced delay. We focus on supporting quality of
service through multi-path routing.
In this paper, we propose EQSR protocol: Energy efficient
and QoS based multi-path routing protocol for WSNs to recover
from node failures and achieves load balancing through splitting
up the traffic across a set of available node-disjoint paths in
order to efficiently balance the energy consumption over multiple
sensor nodes. Furthermore, EQSR increases the reliability of data
delivery through utilizing a light wait XOR-based FEC (Forward
Error Correction) technique to provide data redundancy. Data
redundancy increases resiliency to path failures and enables the
protocol to recover lost data and reconstruct the original message,
while avoiding any excessive delay due to data retransmissions.
EQSR uses the residual energy, node available buffer size, and
Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR) to predict the next hop through the
path construction phase. EQSR employs a queuing model that is
designed to handle real-time and non-real-time traffic through
service differentiation by giving real-time traffic higher priority
than non-real-time traffic.
The remainder of the paper is organized as follow: In Section 2,
we describe and discuss some of the related work. We detail
our proposal in Section 3. Section 4 presents the performance
evaluation. Finally, we conclude the paper in Section 5.
2. Multipath routing
Single path routing protocols in sensor network are designed
to discover a single path between a source/destination pair. From
the other hand, multipath routing consists of finding multiple
paths between the source and destination nodes. These multiple
paths can be used to solve some trade-offs in such networks and
accommodate with the dynamic nature of WSNs. In this section,
we discuss some benefits and advantages of multipath routing. As
well, we mention some problems that arise when using multipath
routing in wireless sensor networks.
2.1. Benefits of multipath routing
As mentioned in the introduction, multipath routing protocols
can provide load balancing, fault tolerance, bandwidth aggrega-
tion, and reduced delay. Below, we discuss how to provide each
of these benefits in multipath routing.
2.1.1. Load balancing
As stated in [11], one of the reasons for which classical
multipath routing has been explored is to provide load balancing.
Load balancing can be achieved by splitting the traffic across
multiple paths. This use of multipath routing is applicable to
WSNs. Load balancing can spread energy utilization across nodes
in the sensor network, potentially resulting in longer lifetimes.
Furthermore, load balancing helps in avoiding congestion and
bottleneck problems.
2.1.2. Reliability and fault tolerance
Reliability means that the probability that a message generated
at one place in the network can actually routed to the intended
destination. Reliability is a big issue in WSNs, because data
transmission is subject to lost due to several reasons: various kinds
of interference, media access conflicts, network topology changes,
etc. These reasons affect the wireless radios to correctly decode the
wireless signals.
One of the reasons behind developing multipath routing is to
provide route failure protection, and increase resiliency to route
failures. Discovering and maintaining multiple paths between
the source–destination pair improves the routing performance
by providing alternative routes. When the primary path fails, an
alternative path will be used to transfer the data. In this case the
multiple paths are not used simultaneously.
Multiple paths can be used simultaneously for data routing.
Simultaneous multipath routing could be used to improve
reliability. This could be done by sending multiple copies of data
across different paths. As long as, one of the multiple paths does
not fail, the receiver node will receive the data. Sending multiple
copies is not the only way to provide fault tolerance, but there
are many methods that are suitable for sensor networks by using
source coding schemes such as FEC techniques [16].
2.1.3. Highly aggregated bandwidth
Bandwidth may be limited in a WSN, routing over a single path
may not provide enough bandwidth for a connection. However,
if data are routed over multiple paths simultaneously, the overall
bandwidth of the paths may satisfy the bandwidth requirement of
an application.
2.1.4. Minimizing end to end delay
By assuming that the paths between the source–destination
pair are node disjoint paths where correlation between the paths
is very low, and there is no route coupling between different
 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857
1 2 3 4
S D
5 QoS is the Sequential Assignment Routing (SAR) protocol [23].
6 7 8
Fig. 1. Two node-disjoint paths [6].
routes (this could be achieved, for example, through the using
of directional antennas), the end to end delay can be minimized
by dividing the data (to be sent) into a number of segments and
using multiple paths to route segments simultaneously to the
destination. Consider the following example [6]:
As, we assumed each node in Fig. 1 uses a directional antenna
towards its target node only, then the communication in the route
S-1-2-3-4-D will not effect the communication on the route S-5-6-
7-8-D.
In this example, when node 1 is transmitting a packet to
node 2, S can transmit a packet to node 5 simultaneously. Thus
the destination D will receive a packet at every time-tick with
two disjoint paths using directional antenna. This scheme of
communication decreases the overall end-to-end delay between
S and D.
2.2. Problems with multipath routing
Nodes in the wireless sensor network use a shared wireless
channel to communicate. This means neighboring nodes must
content for the channel. When the channel is busy by a
transmitting node, neighboring nodes hear the transmission and
are blocked from receiving data from other nodes. Additionally,
depending on the under laying MAC protocol, neighboring nodes
may have to defer their transmission till the channel is free.
Even when multiple channels are used, the quality of neighboring
transmission may be degraded because of the interference.
Now, consider the use of a multipath routing, where the
multiple paths are used simultaneously. Even, the multiple routes
are node-disjoint paths, transmissions over the routes may
interfere if some nodes are in the transmission range of each other.
This problem is called route coupling. Route coupling occurs when
two routes are located physically close enough to interfere with
each other during data communication. As a result, nodes in those
two routes are constantly contending for access to the wireless
channel they share and can end up performing worse than a
single path protocol. Thus, node-disjoint routes are not a sufficient
condition for improved performance. Refer to Reference [6] for
more details.
In Reference [26], authors have studied this problem and
proposed a measure for the coupling between two routes using
a correlation factor. The correlation factor between two node-
disjoint paths is defined as the number of links connecting the
two paths [26]. Choosing paths that have low correlation factor can
improve the performance of multipath routing.
Route coupling can be reduced or completely removed through
the use of directional antenna. For example, if each node in
Fig. 1 uses a directional antenna towards its target node only,
the the communication in path S-1-2-3-4-D will not affect the
communication on the path S-5-6-7-8-D. For more details refer to
References [6,22].
3. Related work
QoS routing in sensor networks is a challenging problem
because of the scarce resources of the sensor node. Thus, this
problem has received a significant attention from the research
community, where many proposals are being made. Some QoS
851
oriented routing proposals are surveyed in [1,8]. In this section we
do not give a comprehensive summary of the related work, instead
we present and discuss some proposals related to our protocol.
One of the early proposed routing protocols that provide some
SAR protocol is a multi-path routing protocol that makes routing
decisions based on three factors: energy resources, QoS on each
path, and packet’s priority level. Multiple paths are created by
building a tree rooted at the source to the destination. During
construction of paths those nodes which have low QoS and low
residual energy are avoided. Upon the construction of the tree,
most of the nodes will belong to multiple paths. To transmit data
to sink, SAR computes a weighted QoS metric as a product of the
additive QoS metric and a weighted coefficient associated with the
priority level of the packet to select a path. Employing multiple
paths increases fault tolerance, but SAR protocol suffers from the
overhead of maintaining routing tables and QoS metrics at each
sensor node.
K. Akkaya and M. Younis in [2] proposed a cluster based
QoS aware routing protocol that employs a queuing model to
handle both real-time and non-real-time traffic. The protocol only
considers the end-to-end delay. The protocol associates a cost
function with each link and uses the K-least-cost path algorithm to
find a set of the best candidate routes. Each of the routes is checked
against the end-to-end constraints and the route that satisfies the
constraints is chosen to send the data to the sink. All nodes initially
are assigned the same bandwidth ratio which makes constraints on
other nodes which require higher bandwidth ratio. Furthermore,
the transmission delay is not considered in the estimation of the
end-to-end delay, which sometimes results in selecting routes that
do not meet the required end-to-end delay. However, the problem
of bandwidth assignment is solved in [30] by assigning a different
bandwidth ratio for each type of traffic for each node.
SPEED [12] is another QoS based routing protocol that
provides soft real-time end-to-end guarantees. Each sensor node
maintains information about its neighbors and exploits geographic
forwarding to find the paths. To ensure packet delivery within the
required time limits, SPEED enables the application to compute
the end-to-end delay by dividing the distance to the sink by the
speed of packet delivery before making any admission decision.
Furthermore, SPEED can provide congestion avoidance when the
network is congested. However, while simulation results in [12]
have shown that SPEED outperforms other protocols, this does
not mean that SPEED is an energy efficient protocol. Because the
protocols used in the head to head comparison are not energy
aware protocols. The SPEED protocol does not consider any energy
metric in its routing protocol, which makes a question about its
energy efficiency. Therefore, for more realistic understanding of
SPEED’s energy consumption, it should be compared with energy
aware routing protocols.
Message-initiated Constrained-Based Routing (MCBR) mecha-
nism is proposed in [10]. MCBR is composed of explicit specifica-
tions of constraint-based destinations, route constraints and QoS
requirements for messages, and a set of QoS aware meta-strategies.
Given the destination and routing constraints, routes from the
source to the destination are established through flooding the net-
work. Through applying general purpose meta routing strategies, a
data message is routed from source to destination via a route that
satisfies the QoS requirements for that data message. However, the
extra control packets (because of flooding the network with con-
trol packets) are a significant overhead. The same authors in [19]
have proposed the QoS aware learning based routing to decrease
the complexity of MCBR protocol and enhance its performance.
Felemban et al. proposed Multi-path and Multi-speed Routing
Protocol (MMSPEED) for probabilistic QoS guarantee in WSNs [31].
QoS of service provisioning is done in two domains; timelines
852 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857
domain and reliability domain. Multiple QoS levels are provided
in the timelines domain by using different delivery speeds, while
different reliability requirements are supported by probabilistic
multipath forwarding. However, MMSPEED lacks a method for
dealing with the data redundancy problem, which leads to
consuming a large amount of energy as shown in [32]. In this
context a data aggregation mechanism can be added to enhance
the performance of the protocol.
Recently, X. Huang and Y. Fang have proposed a multi-
constrained QoS multi-path routing (MCMP) protocol [14] that
uses braided routes to deliver packets to the sink node according
to certain QoS requirements expressed in terms of reliability
and delay. The problem of the end-to-end delay is formulated
as an optimization problem, and then an algorithm based on
linear integer programming is applied to solve the problem. The
protocol objective is to utilize the multiple paths to augment
network performance with moderate energy cost. However, the
protocol always routes the information over the path that includes
minimum number of hops to satisfy the required QoS, which
leads in some cases to more energy consumption. Authors
in [5], have proposed the Energy constrained multi-path routing
(ECMP) that extends the MCMP protocol by formulating the QoS
routing problem as an energy optimization problem constrained
by reliability, play-back delay, and geo-spatial path selection
constraints. The ECMP protocol trades between minimum number
of hops and minimum energy by selecting the path that satisfies
the QoS requirements and minimizes energy consumption.
Meeting QoS requirements in WSNs introduces certain over-
head into routing protocols in terms of energy consumption, inten-
sive computations, and significantly large storage. This overhead
is unavoidable for those applications that need certain delay and
bandwidth requirements. In our proposal, we combine different
ideas from the previous protocols in order to optimally tackle the
problem of QoS in sensor networks. In our proposal we try to satisfy
the QoS requirements with the minimum energy. Our EQSR routing
protocol performs routes discovery using multiple criteria such as
energy remaining, remaining buffer size and signal-to-noise ratio.
In the next section we detail our proposal.
4. Description of EQSR protocol
In this section, we first define some assumptions, then we
provide the details of multiple paths discovery and maintenance,
as well as the traffic allocation and data transmission across the
multiple paths.
4.1. Assumptions
We assume N identical sensor nodes are distributed randomly
in the sensing filed. All nodes have the same transmission range,
and have enough battery power to carry their sensing, computing,
and communication activities. The network is fully connected and
dens (i.e. data can be sent from one node to another in a multi-
hop bases). Each node in the network is assigned a unique ID and
all nodes are willing to participate in communication process by
forwarding data. Furthermore, we assume that the sensor nodes
are stationery for their lifetime. Additionally, at any time, we
assume that each sensor node is able to compute its residual
energy (the remaining energy level), and its available buffer size
(remaining memory space to cache the sensory data while it is
waiting for servicing), as well as record the link performance
between itself and its neighboring node in terms of signal-to-
noise ratio (SNR). By examining recent link performance data,
predications and decisions about path stability may be made.
Hop Residual Free Link
Source ID
Count Energy Buffer Quality
Fig. 2. HELLO message structure.
4.2. Link cost function
The link cost function is used by the node to select the next hop
during the path discovery phase. We use a cost function such as
presented in [17] with some changes. Let Nx be the set of neighbors
of node x. Then our cost function includes an energy factor,
available buffer factor, and interference factor with appropriate
weights (α , β , and γ ):
Next hop = max{α Eresd,y + β Bbuffer ,y + γ Iinterference,xy },
y∈Nx
where, Eresd,y is the current residual energy of node y, where y ∈ Nx ,
Bbuffer ,y is the available buffer size of node y, and Iinterference,xy is
the SNR for the link between x and y. In this cost function, we
only consider the residual energy of node y but not x. Because
node y consumes energy for data reception and transmission if it
is selected as a next hop for node x. We do not consider node x,
because whatever node y is, node x still needs to spend the same
amount of energy on data transmission [17].
The total cost (Ctotal ) for a path P consists of a set of K nodes is
the sum of the individual link costs l(xy)i,i∈K along the path. Then we
have:
K −1
X
Ctotal,P = l(xy)i .
i =1
4.3. Paths discovery phase
Based on the idea of the directed diffusion [11,15], the sink
node starts the multiple paths discovery phase to create a set of
neighbors that able to forward data towards the sink from the
source node. The constructed multi-paths are node-disjoint paths
(i.e. have no common nodes except the source and the destination).
In multi-path routing, node-disjoint paths are usually preferred
because they utilize the most available network resources, and
hence are the most fault-tolerant. If an intermediate node in a set
of node-disjoint paths fails, only the path containing that node
is affected, so there is a minimum impact to the diversity of the
routes [11].
The path discovery procedure is executed according to the
following phases:
• Initialization phase: Each sensor node broadcast a HELLO
message to its neighboring nodes in order to have enough
information about which of its neighbors can provide it with the
highest quality data. Each sensor node maintains and updates
its neighboring table during this phase. The neighboring table
contains information about the list of neighboring nodes of
the sensor node. Fig. 2 illustrates the structure of the HELLO
message. The link quality field is expressed in terms of signal-to-
noise ratio (SNR) for the link between any node and its neighbor.
Hop count gives the distance in hops for the message from its
originator. As the message is only broadcasted to the neighbors
of the node, this field is not used in this version of the protocol.
• Primary Path discovery phase: After initialization phase each
sensor node has enough information to compute the cost
function for its neighboring nodes. Then, the sink node locally
computes its preferred next hop node using the link cost
function, and sends out a RREQ message to its most preferred
next hop (Fig. 3 shows the structure of the RREQ message).
Similarly, through the link cost function, the preferred next hop
 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857 853

Source Dest. Residual Free Link Route Table 1

Route ID Some values for the bound α [9].
ID ID Energy Buffer Quality Cost
α 95% 90% 85% 80% 50%
Fig. 3. RREQ message structure. xα −1.65 −1.28 −1.03 −0.85 0

RREQ RREQ
i1
Sink 0 9 P1

L paths for
RT traffic
5 i2

Traffic Allocation Scheme

Data Reassembly and Recovery

Real Time Traffic
RREO RREQ
P2

N- available paths
Instant Queue
RREQ IIIUSE

CLASSIFIER
7 RREQ iL

PACKET
2 Source
8 RREQ j1 Destination
3

NRT traffic
j2

M paths for
Non-Real Time Traffic
RREQ
6 RREQ jM
1 FIFO QUEUE
Source PN

4
Primary Path
Alternative Path
Fig. 4. Example of path discovery.
node of the sink computes locally its most preferred next hop in
the direction of the source node, and sends out a RREQ message
to its next hop, the operation continues until source node
(see Fig. 4).
• Alternative Paths discovery phase: For the second alternate
path, the sink sends alternate path RREQ message to its next
most preferred neighbor. To avoid having paths with shared
node, we limit each node to accept only one RREQ message.
For those nodes that receive more than one RREQ message,
only accept the first RREQ message and reject the remaining
messages (see Fig. 4, for an example of path construction. In this
example Node 9 computes its next preferred neighbor finds it
Node 7. Node 9 generates RREQ message and forwards to node
7, but node 7 has been included in the primary path, then node
7 simply responds to node 9 with an INUSE message indicating
that node 7 is already selected in a routing path. Immediately
node 9, searches its neighboring table and computes the next
preferred neighbor, which will be node 5, and sends out RREQ
message to it. Node 5 accepts the message and continues the
procedure in the direction of the source node).
4.4. Path refreshment
In order to save energy, we reduce the overhead traffic through
reducing control messages. Therefore, instead of periodically
flooding a KEEPALIVE message to keep multiple paths alive and
update cost function metrics, we append the metrics on the data
message by attaching the residual energy, remaining buffer size,
and link quality to the data message.
4.5. Paths selection
After the completion of paths discovery phase and the paths
have been constructed, we need to select a set of paths from the
N available paths to transfer the traffic from the source to the des-
tination with a desired bound of data delivery given by α . To find
the number of required paths, we assume that each path is asso-
ciated with some rate pi (i = 1, 2, . . . , N ) that corresponds to the
probability of successfully delivering a message to the destination.
Following the work done in [9], the number of required paths is
calculated as:
v
u N
uX N
X delay and more energy consumption through data retransmission.
k = xα .t pi (1 − pi ) + pi
i=1 i =1
Fig. 5. Functional diagram of the EQSR protocol.
where xα is the corresponding bound from the standard normal
distribution for different levels of α . Table 1 lists some values for xα .
Now out of the k paths, the protocol picks out a number of l
paths to be used to transfer the real-time traffic, and m paths for
non-real-time traffic, where k = l + m. To calculate l, we assume
that the sensor node knows the size of its traffic (both real-time and
non-real-time traffic). Let Tr represents the size of the real-time
traffic, Tnr represents the size of the non-real-time traffic, then we
have:
Tr
l= k,
Tr + Tnr
Tnr
m= k.
Tr + Tnr
As we divided the k paths between the real-time and non-real-
time traffic according to the traffic size, we select the best l paths
that minimize the end to end delay to transfer the real-time traffic
to ensure that the critical-time data is delivered to the destination
within the time requirements, with out any delay. To find the best
baths in terms of the end-to-end delay, during the paths discovery
phase, each sensor node estimates the time elapsed for the RREQ
packet since its transmission from the node’s neighbor till it is
received by the node itself. By accumulating this time, the source
node can compute end-to-end delay for each of the available paths.
4.6. Traffic allocation and data transmission
Our protocol employs the queuing model presented in [2] to
handle both real-time and non-real-time traffic. Two different
queues are used, one instant priority queue for real-time traffic,
and the other queue follows the first in first out basis for non-
real-time traffic. Fig. 5 shows the functional diagram of the EQSR
protocol.
The source node knows the degree of the importance of each
data packet it is sending which can be translated into predefined
priority levels. The application layer sets the required priority level
for each data packet by appending an extra bit of information to
act as a stamp to distinguish between real-time and non-real-time
packets. Based on the packet type, the classifier directs packets
into the appropriate queue. The traffic allocation scheme first
splits up the packets into a number of equal sized sub-packets
(or segments), and then schedules sub-packets simultaneously for
transmission across the available multiple paths. Before scheduling
the sub-packets, the traffic allocation scheme adds error correction
codes to improve the reliability of transmission and to increase
the resiliency to paths failures and ensure that an essential portion
of the packet is received by the destination without incurring any
At the sink node, the parts are collected, reassembled, and the
original message is recovered. More details are given below.
854 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857
l l
S0 S1 S2 SN-2 SN-1 C0 C1 C2
Original Message Correction codes
UP ID MS Off SA DA PT Data
UP: Cost Metrics SA: Source Address
ID: Identification DA: Destination Address
MS: More Segments Data: upto 256 bytes
Offset: Segment Offset PT: Extra bit marks the packet type (0:NRT, 1:RT)
Fig. 6. Packet format (original message and correction codes).
4.7. Data transfer across multiple paths
Data transfer is done through two steps; packet segmentation
and encoding; data forwarding and Recovery. The details are given
below:
4.7.1. Data packet segmentation and encoding
The data packet is split up into N equal sized segments
(S0 , S1 , S2 , . . . , SN −1 ), and over head part of M + 1 (where M <
N) error correction codes (C0 , C1 , C2 , C3 , . . . , CM ) of same size as
the data segment are added to the original message (see Fig. 5).
The data segments and error correction codes are of the same
size (l bytes) and are specified in unites of 8 bytes, which is
why segment length should be a multiple of 8 (by referring to
Fig. 6, the off field is used to solve the problem of reassembling
the message at the receiver side. Off field helps in sequencing
segments by indicating to the receiver where in the overall
message each particular segment should be placed). Correction
codes are calculated as a function of the information bits to provide
redundant information. We use an XOR-based coding algorithm
like the one presented in [27]. This algorithm does not require high
computation power or high storage space. The correction codes are
computed as follow:
C0 = S0 ⊕ S1 ⊕ S2 ⊕ · · · ⊕ SN −1
C1 = S1 ⊕ S2 ⊕ S3 ⊕ · · · ⊕ SM
C2 = S2 ⊕ S3 ⊕ S4 ⊕ · · · ⊕ S(M +1)mod N
C3 = S3 ⊕ S4 ⊕ S5 ⊕ · · · ⊕ S(M +2)mod N
..
. We evaluate the performance and validate the effectiveness
CM = SM ⊕ S1 ⊕ S2 ⊕ · · · ⊕ S(M +k)mod N
where ⊕ represents exclusive OR operation.
Correction codes are generated for both types of traffic, real
time and non-real time. In the above equations; N = l for real-
time traffic, and N = m for non-real-time traffic (see Section 4.5).
4.7.2. Traffic allocation
After the selection of a set of multiple paths for both traffic
types (real time, and non-real time), and after adding FEC codes,
the source node can begin sending data to the destination along
the paths. The traffic allocation mechanism used deal with how the
data is distributed amongst the available paths. We use a weighted
traffic allocation strategy to distribute the traffic amongst the
available paths to improve the end to end delay and throughput.
In this strategy, the source node distributes the traffic amongst the
paths according to the end to end delay of each path. – The end to
end delay of each path is estimated during the paths construction
phase (refer to Section 4.5 for the estimation method) – Paths that
have a smaller end to end delay are allocated more data segments
than other paths. We assume that end to end delay of each path
is inversely proportional to the available bandwidth. To satisfy
this assumption, we assume that nodes in the sensor network are
homogeneous and the bandwidth-delay product is a constant.
4.7.3. Data forwarding and recovery
After computing the XOR error correction codes, the segments
CM
of the original message (S1 , S2 , S3 , . . . , SN ) along with the error
correction codes (C0 , C1 , C2 , C3 , . . . , CM ) are sent out across the
multiple available paths. In [4], authors have proven that if M
or less segments are lost out of the N + M total data and
overhead (correction codes), the original N message segments
can be recovered using appropriate linear transformations (in our
case through XOR operation). The original message could be
regenerated as follow:
S1 = C0 ⊕ C2
S2 = C0 ⊕ C3
..
.
S M = C0 ⊕ C1 .
Fig. 6 shows the packet segmentation and the fields in each
segment (or sub-packet). We use a fixed segment length, and
segments must have a length that is a multiple of 8, to allow
proper offset specification. The UP field is an encoded peace of
information that represents the current value of metrics used in the
cost function (i.e. residual energy, remaining buffer size, and SNR
ratio) to avoid excessive control packets to maintain and keep routs
alive. Each node along the path, after updating its neighboring table
with this information, changes this value by its current metrics
and forwards the sub-packet into its next hop. The Identification
field (ID) is a unique identifier assigned to each message being
fragmented. The field is used by the sink node to reassemble
messages without accidentally mixing segments from different
messages. More Segments (MS), this bit is set to 1 for all segments
except the last one, which has it set to 0. When the segment with
a value of zero in the MS bit is seen, the receiver knows that it has
received the last segment of the message. Segment Offset (off), this
field solves the problem of sequencing segments by indicating to
the receiver where in the original message each particular segment
should be placed. The PT field is an extra bit, used to distinguish
between real-time and non-real-time packets, in order for the
packet classifier to forward each packet to its appropriate queue.
5. Performance evaluation of EQSR protocol
of our EQSR through simulation. In this section, we describe
the performance metrics, simulation environment and simulation
results. We used NS-2 to implement and conduct a set of
simulation experiments for our protocol and do a comparative
study with the MCMP protocol [14].
Our simulation environment consists of 300 sensor nodes
randomly deployed in a field of 500 m × 500 m. All nodes are
identical with a radio transmission range set to 25 m. The sink node
is situated at the upper right corner of the simulation field, and the
source node is situated on the left bottom corner. Table 2 shows
the simulation parameters.
We investigate the performance of the EQSR protocol in a multi-
hop network topology. The metrics used in the evaluation are the
energy consumption, delivery ratio, and average delay. The average
energy consumption is the average of the energy consumed by the
nodes participating in message transfer from source node to the
sink node. The delivery ratio is the number of packets generated
by the source node to the number of packets received by the sink
node. The average delay is the average time required to transfer
a data packet from source node to the sink node. We study the
impact of packets generation rate and node failure probability on
these performance metrics. Simulation results are averaged over
several simulation runs.
 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857 855

Table 2
Simulation parameters.

Network field 500 m × 500 m

Number of sensors 200
Number of sinks/number of sources 1/1
Transmission range 25 m
Packet size (data + over head) 1024 bytes
Sub-packet size 256 bytes
Transmit power 15 mW
Receive power 13 mW
Idle power 12 mW
Sleep mode Power 0.015 mW
Initial battery power 100 J
MAC layer IEEE 802.11
Fig. 8. Packets delivery ratio.
Max buffer size 256 K-bytes
Buffer threshold 1024 bytes
Number of correction codes Set to 1/3rd of the available paths
Weights (α , β , and γ )respectively 3/2/3
Simulation time 1000 s

Fig. 9. Average energy consumption.

Fig. 7. Average end-to-end delay.

5.1. Impact of packets generation rate

In this experiment, we change the packets arrival rate at the

source node from 10 to 100 packets/s. The generated traffic at
the source node is mixed traffic of both real- and non-real-time
traffic. The real-time traffic is set to 10% of the generated traffic.
We compare our protocol with the MCMP protocol.

5.1.1. Average end-to-end delay

End to end delay is an important metric in evaluating QoS
based routing protocols. The average packet delay of EQSR and
MCMP protocols as the packet arrival rate increases is illustrated
in Fig. 7. In this experiment, we change the packet arrival rate
at the source node, and measure the delay for both real-time
and non-real-time traffic. From the results, it is clear that EQSR
successfully differentiates network service by giving high real-time
traffic absolute preferential treatment over low priority traffic. The
real-time traffic is always combined with low end-to-end delay.
MCMP protocol outperforms our protocol in the case of non-real-
time traffic, because of the overhead caused by the queuing model.
Furthermore, for higher traffic rates the average delay increases
because the EQSR protocol gives priority to process real-time traffic
first, which causes more queuing delay for non-real-time traffic at
each sensor node.
5.1.2. Packet delivery ratio
Another important metric in evaluating routing protocols is the
average delivery ratio. Fig. 8 shows the average delivery ratio of
EQSR and MCMP protocols. Obviously, EQSR protocol outperforms
the MCMP protocol; this is because in the case of path failures,
EQSR uses forward error correction (FEC) technique to retrieve the
original message, which is not implemented in the MCMP protocol.
Implementing a FEC technique in the routing algorithm enhances
the delivery ratio of the protocol as well as minimizes the overall
energy consumption specially in the case of route failures.
Fig. 10. Average packet delay as node failure increases.
5.1.3. Average energy consumption
Fig. 9 shows the results for the energy consumption. From
the figure, we note that MCMP slightly outperforms our protocol;
this is because of the overhead induced by the queuing model
and error codes computation. However, meeting the quality of
service requirements (delay and throughput) introduces a certain
overhead in terms of energy consumption. Thus a minimum
tradeoff with delay and throughput should be made to reduce
the energy expenditure [21]. By changing the network conditions
and considering node failures, the energy consumption of the
MCMP protocol increases significantly as shown in Fig. 12, which
is commented below in Section 5.2.3.
5.2. Impact of node failure probability
In this simulation experiment, we study the behavior of the
protocol in the presence of node failures. We fix the packets arrival
rate at 50 packets/s, and change the node failure probability from
0 to 0.05. The results are averaged over several simulation runs.
5.2.1. Average delay
The average packet delay of the EQSR and MCMP protocols as
the node failure probability increases is depicted in Fig. 10. We
observe that, the MCMP protocol is very sensitive to the increase
856 J. Ben-Othman, B. Yahya / J. Parallel Distrib. Comput. 70 (2010) 849–857
Fig. 11. Average delivery ratio as node failure increases.
Fig. 12. Average energy consumption as node failure increases.
in node failure probability. The average delay of MCMP protocol
increases up to approximately 1.6 s for node failure probability
of 0.05 (i.e. increased by about 1.4 s compared to Fig. 6). On the
other hand, our EQSR protocol (either for real-time or non-real-
time traffic) is not as sensitive to the increase of node failure
probability as MCMP protocol. The FEC technique implemented
in EQSR protocol makes the protocol very effective and more
resilience to node failures. Furthermore, the delay is not affected
too much as the node failure probability increases.
5.2.2. Average delivery ratio
This average delivery ratio for both protocols is illustrated in
Fig. 11. As the node failure probability increases, the delivery
ratio of MCMP protocol drops significantly (compared to Fig. 7,
for node failure probability of 0.05, the delivery ratio dropped
from 0.78 to 0.37). Contrary, the EQSR protocol is slightly affected
by the increase in the node failure probability. This is because
EQSR employs an error correction scheme which contributes
in increasing the delivery ratio in the case of path failures by
reconstructing the original message using the generated XOR-
codes without the need to initiate data retransmissions.
5.2.3. Average energy consumption
Fig. 12 shows the results for the energy consumption under
node failures. Obviously our EQSR protocol outperforms the MCMP
protocol in this case. Compared to Fig. 8, we observe that EQSR
protocol achieves more energy savings than MCMP protocol. This
is because EQSR protocol easily recovers from path failures and be
able to reconstruct the original messages through the use of the
FEC algorithm. While the MCMP protocol needs to initiate a data
retransmission to recover lost data, which leads to a significant
increase in the energy consumption (compared to Fig. 9).
6. Conclusion
In this paper, we have presented our EQSR protocol; an
energy efficient and quality of service aware multi-path routing
protocol designed specifically for wireless sensor networks to
provide service differentiation by giving real-time traffic absolute
preferential treatment over the non-real-time traffic. Our protocol
uses the multi-path paradigm together with a Forward Error
Correction (FEC) technique to recover from node failures without
invoking network-wide flooding for path-discovery. This feature is
very important in sensor networks since flooding consumes energy
and consequently reduces the network lifetime.
Our EQSR protocol uses the residual energy, node available
buffer size, and signal-to-noise ratio to predict the next hop
through the paths construction phase. EQSR splits up the
transmitted message into a number of segments of equal size,
adds correction codes, and then transmits it over multiple paths
simultaneously to increase the probability that an essential portion
of the packet is received at the destination without incurring
excessive delay. EQSR protocol handles both real-time and non-
real-time traffic efficiently, by employing a queuing model that
provides service differentiation.
Through computer simulation, we have evaluated and studied
the performance of our routing protocol under different network
conditions and compared it with the MCMP protocol. Simulation
results have shown that our protocol achieves lower average delay,
more energy savings, and higher delivery ratio than the MCMP
protocol.
As a future work, we are intended to deeply analyze the
performance of our protocol and study the impact of the network
size, path length, and buffer size on the performance metrics.
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Jalel Ben-Othman received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. degrees
both in Computer Science from the University of Pierre
et Marie Curie, (Paris VI) France in 1992, and 1994
respectively. He received his Ph.D. degree from the
University of Versailles, France, in 1998. He was an
Assistant Professor at the University of Orsay (Paris 11) and
University of Pierre et Marie Curie (Paris 6), in 1998 and
1999 respectively. He is now an Associate Professor at the
University of Versailles since 2000.
Dr. Ben-Othman research interests are in the area of
wireless ad hoc and sensor networks, Broadband Wireless
Networks, multi-services bandwidth management in WLAN (IEEE 802.11), WMAN
(IEEE 802.16), WWAN (LTE), security in wireless networks in general and wireless
sensor and ad hoc networks in particular. His work appears in highly respected
international journals and conferences, including, IEEE ICC, Globecom, LCN, VTC,
PIMRC etc.
He has supervised and co-supervised several graduate students in these
areas. His widely known for his wok on wireless ad hoc and sensor network, in
particular security. Since 2002, he has served as Technical committee of more than
40 international IEEE/ACM conferences and workshops including ICC, Globecom,
MSWIM, LCN, etc. He is a member of IEEE and ACM.
He is also serving as the Local Arrangement Chair for the 13th IEEE International
Symposium on Computer Communication (ISCC 09). He serves as a TPC Co-Chair of
9th international Workshop on Wireless local Networks (WLN09), as a publicity
chair of 12-th ACM International Conference on Modeling, Analysis and Simulation
of Wireless and Mobile Systems (MSWIM 09), IEEE International Symposium on
a World of Wireless Mobile and Multimedia Networks (WOWMOM 2010), 25th
Biennial Symposium on Communications and he serves as a TPC Co-Chair of IEEE
Globecom Wireless Communications Symposium (Globecom 2010).
And he is active member of IEEE CIS-TC, TC AHSN, WTC.
Bashir Yahya received a B.Sc. degree in Computer
Engineering from Al-Fateh University, Tripoli, Libya, in
1994, and an M.Sc. degree in Computer Networks from INT
(Institut National des Télécommunications, Evry, France)
in 2004. Currently, he is a member of the Network
Architectures and Services (ASR) research group at PRiSM
laboratory, University of Versailles, Versailles, France,
where he is pursing his Ph.D. degree in Computer Science.
Mr. Yahya research interests include medium access and
routing in wireless sensor networks, quality of service in
WSNs, cross layer optimization and design, and mobility
management. He is a member of IEEE, IEEE Communication Society and ACM.