OFDP: a distributed algorithm for finding disjoint paths with minimum total length in wireless sensor networks

This paper investigates the MINimum-length-(k)-Disjoint-Paths (MIN-(k)-DP) problem: in a sensor network, given two nodes (s) and (t), a positive integer (k), finding (k) (node) disjoint paths connecting (s) and (t) with minimum total length. An efficient distributed algorithm named Optimally-Finding-Disjoint-Paths (OFDP) is proposed for this problem. OFDP guarantees correctness and optimality, i.e., (1) it will find (k) disjoint paths if there exist (k) disjoint paths in the network or the maximum number of disjoint paths otherwise; (2) the disjoint paths it outputs do have minimum total length. To the best of our knowledge, OFDP is the first distributed algorithm that can solve the MIN-(k)-DP problem with correctness and optimality guarantee. Compared with the existing centralized algorithms which also guarantee correctness and optimality, OFDP is shown to be much more efficient by simulation results.