Int. J. Internet Protocol Technology, Vol. 9, No. 4, 2016 161 Copyright © 2016 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. A statistical distributed multipath routing protocol in wireless sensor networks Hossein Jadidoleslamy* Department of Information Technology, Communications and Security, Malekashtar University of Technology (MUT), Tehran, Iran Email: tanha.hossein@gmail.com Email: jadidoleslamy@gmail.com *Corresponding author Mohammad Reza Aref Department of Electrical Engineering, Sharif University of Technology, Tehran, Iran Email: Aref@sharif.edu Hossein Bahramgiri Department of Information Technology, Communications and Security, Malekashtar University of Technology (MUT), Tehran, Iran Email: Bahramgiri@mut.ac.ir Abstract: Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) usually consist of many tiny sensor nodes and a sink. Problems and characteristics like resources’ severe constraints, low reliability and fault tolerance, low throughput, and insecure operational environments, significantly degrade their overall performance. One significant solution against these problems is multipath routing. However, the existing multipath routing protocols have weaknesses like high overhead and algorithmic-computational complexity, security vulnerabilities, low scalability, and permanent usage of optimal paths and resources’ severe exhaustion. As a result, this paper proposes a statistical distributed multipath routing protocol for homogeneous WSNs, called SDMR. It is different from other existing multipath routing protocols in terms of statistical-mathematical nature, criteria and procedure of routing score calculation, routes’ selection process and traffic load distribution technique. The performance of SDMR is compared with the performance of secure and energy-efficient multipath routing protocol (called SEEM); results of algorithmic-complexity and statistical-simulation analyses show that the SDMR is improved in terms of energy consumption, throughput, accuracy, average rate of packet loss, scalability and fault tolerance, average delay and routing overhead in the route discovery process. Keywords: wireless sensor network; WSN; communication protocol; routing protocol; multipath routing. Reference to this paper should be made as follows: Jadidoleslamy, H., Aref, M.R. and Bahramgiri, H. (2016) ‘A statistical distributed multipath routing protocol in wireless sensor networks’, Int. J. Internet Protocol Technology, Vol. 9, No. 4, pp.161–173. Biographical notes: Hossein Jadidoleslamy is a PhD candidate in Computer Science-Information Technology (CS-IT) at the Malekashtar University of Technology (MUT) in Tehran, Iran. He received his BSc in Information Technology (IT) Engineering from the University of Sistan and Balouchestan (USB), Zahedan, Iran, in 2009. He also has been received his MSc in Information Technology (IT) Engineering from the University of Guilan, Rasht, Iran, in 2011. His research interests include computer networks (wireless sensor network), network security (trust management systems), information security (intrusion detection system) and e-commerce.