Research On Routing Protocols And Simulation Model For Underwater Sensor Networks

With the significant progress in wireless sensor networks and upsurge in marineeconomic development, underwater sensors networks (UWSNs), characterized by lowcost and high reliability, are attracting more and more attention and have become anew hot research area of the21stcentury. It illustrates a good prospect of applicationon oceanographic data collection, environmental monitoring, undersea explorations,disaster prevention, assisted navigation and distributed tactical surveillance.UWSN, which is deployed in the particular underwater environment, adoptacoustic communications as the typical communication technology. The uniquecharacteristics of underwater acoustic communication channel, such as limitedcapacity, high and variable propagation delays and significant impact of highlyvariable environmental conditions, make UWSN different from terrestrial sensornetworks in many ways, including low bandwidths, high attenuation, highpropagation delays and high BER (Bit Error Ratio). As a result, the protocols oftraditional wireless network are unfit to UWSN.There have been some research achievements for UWSN, but the uncertainty ofphysical world makes it necessary to verify and evaluate the achievements beforeactual deployment, in order to identify and resolve the problems timely. Right now,there are two main kinds of evaluation methods for UWSN, which are simulator andtest platform. Compared to simulator, the test platform assesses the new protocols inthe actual application environment, with consideration of the variety and complexityof underwater acoustic channel, so the results are more satisfied. This paper carries on research and design on routing protocol and simulationmodel for UWSNs. A prioritized routing protocol based on age rumors named PAR isproposed by making a series of improvements on FBG and Spray routing, combinedwith the advantages of single-copy and multiple-copy routing protocols. In addition, asimulation platform applied to underwater sensor networks has been proposed in thispaper, and then a testing experiment for PAR has been done to evaluate itsperformance. What this paper studies is listed as follows.1. The topology and protocol stack of UWSN are introduced in the first twochapters, and the design challenges of UWSN protocols are analyzed; and after that,we give an overview about the state-of-art of routing protocols and test platforms ofUWSN, and introduce several classical routing schemes, simulators and test platformsand discuss their strengths and weaknesses.2. Based on traditional routing protocols, a prioritized routing protocol based onage rumors, named PAR, is proposed by making a series of improvements on FBGand Spray routing, combined with the characteristics of UWSN. The protocol makesforwarding decision based on the age of node, and a conversion from single-copy tomultiple-copy is realized on the basis of age difference of adjacent two hops. Witheffective combination of advantages of single-copy and multiple-copy protocols, thenetwork performance is improved with lower energy consumption. The simulationresults show that the performance of PAR is much better than FBG and SprayRouting.3. Some research has been done on simulation model for UWSNs. The networkmodel, composed of node mobility model, link model and transmission model, hasbeen built at first, and then we put forward the evaluation method of some networkperformance criteria, and the model classes are designed at last.