Geographic and Opportunistic Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks
Abstract
Geographic and Opportunistic Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks. One way to improve the data collection in UWSNs is through the design of routing protocols considering the unique characteristics of the underwater acoustic communication and the highly dynamic network topology. In this paper, we propose the GEDAR routing protocol for UWSNs.GEDAR is an anycast, geographic and opportunistic routing protocol that routes data packets from sensor nodes to multiple sonobuoys (sinks) at the sea’s surface. Simulation results show that GEDAR significantly improves the network performance when compared with the baseline solutions, even in hard
and difficult mobile scenarios of very sparse and very dense networks and for high network traffic loads.
Differently of the pro-active and re-active routing approaches, it does not require the establishment or maintenance of complete routes and there is no need to transmit routing messages to update states. This strategy makes geographic routing protocols simple and scalable. However, it suffers from a serious drawback called communication void region.
Conclusion
In this paper, we introduced a novel geographic and opportunistic routing protocol (GEDAR),
for underwater mobile sensor networks. GEDAR uses the position information of the nodes to greedily and opportunistically forward data packets to sonobuoy.
Instead of message-based procedures to deal with the communication void region problem found in geographic routing for mobile underwater sensor networks, we proposed a depth adjustment-based topology control such that void nodes move to new depths to resume the greedy opportunistic forwarding.
Simulation results showed that this new algorithm improves the data packet delivery ratio when compared with the baseline routing protocols. As future work we plan to investigate how the depth adjustment of some nodes can impact the sensing coverage area.
