The Study Of Routing Protocols For Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater sensor networks are a kind of special sensor networks. It consists of a variable number of sensors and vehicles that are deployed to perform collaborative monitoring tasks over a given area. Underwater sensor networks are envisioned to enable applications for oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation and tactical surveillance applications.Complexity of underwater acoustic channel such as high delay, delay variance, multi-path propagation and Doppler spread , makes it impossible to apply direct protocols for terrestrial wireless communication networks to underwater. How to integrate a simple and efficient underwater sensor networks is still a new studying field on the base of the underwater acoustic communication.In the thesis, routing protocols in network layer are studied. The principle of many current existing routing protocols are introduced. In accordance with the feature of underwater acoustic channel and the architecture of underwater sensor networks,the routing protocols based on location-preset information is more fit for underwater sensor networks. Then GPSR protocol is studied.In underwater sensor networks, not only the energy expenditure of the sole node but also the whole networks'energy balance is cared for in the routing protocols to extend the network's lifetime. A new routing approach is proposed to get the optimal path thinking over the geographical energy aware and loading equilibrium in this thesis. In the end this thesis presents the comparison between this algorithm and the common GPSR through OPNET.According to our simulations, we find that the new algorithm can not only maintain former performance but also prolong the survival time of the network.