Design Of Virtual-Path Based Energy Efficiency Routing For Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASN) is a key technology for the oceanexploitation. Routing schemes specially designed for it are urgently needed.This paper considers energy aware and energy balance routing schemes and aim toprolong network lifetime, because the energy problem is even more serious for UWASNthan the terrestrial WSN. To obtain this aim, the paper introduces the concept of “vir-tual path”, which gives a very simple view of the network for a sensor node. By usingthe concept, the routing protocol can get more global information, especially the energyinformation, in a local and distributed way.Based on the concept, this paper proposes two different routing algorithms. Firstlyit proposes Virtual Path Based Routing(VPBR) and VPBR with Residual Energy Predic-tion (VPBR-P). And by combining the Q-learing reinforcement learning method with the”virtual path” concept, VPBR with Q-learing (VPBRQ) is also proposed.Simulations show that the protocols can achieve the target of balancing the energyconsumption and of prolonging the network lifetime with no loss of the network perfor-mance.