Research on Energy-Efficient Multi-Path Routing Protocol of WSN for Railway Environment Monitoring

WSN for railway environment monitoring is a typical linear wireless sensor network. In order to improve the poor robustness of single path routing protocol, this paper proposes an energy-efficient multi-path routing protocol suitable for narrow strip area along the railway. In this protocol, "One-step-hop" transmission and "two-step-hop" transmission are designed to send packets with different priority level so that packets with high priority can be transmitted with fewer hops for better efficiency. Failure mechanism of this protocol further improves the robustness of the network. Results of simulations demonstrate the superiority and feasibility of this multi-path routing protocol.