Design Of An Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network Opportunistic Routing Protocol

Underwater acoustic sensor networks have been enabling technologies for ocean engineering to explore and exploit marine resources. In recent years, researchers have made a great advance on underwater acoustic sensor networks in many aspects, such as underwater acoustic channel modeling, acoustic modem, underwater acoustic media access control, routing, and so on.Underwater communication environment is very harsh. The underwater acoustic channel is a doubly selective fading channel, with time-varying and space-varying characteristics. Moreover, the channel received severe multipath effect and the Doppler effect. Usually, underwater acoustic sensor networks need to transfer the collected data through multi-hop paths to the sink nodes on the surface of the sea. Therefore, how to providing reliable routing and forwarding to overcome the serious multipath interference, high background noise, delay spread, low available band width in underwater acoustic communication environment is the key problem for the design of underwater acoustic communication network.This paper mainly studies the routing protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks, targeting at improving the transfer delivery ratio and saving energy consumption. Based on the analysis of the characteristics of the sensor network and the existing routing protocols, we propose DUOR( Depth-based Underwater Opportunistic Routing protocol), which exploits any diversity opportunities of receiving probability in multiple intermediate nodes. With the analysis of the "void area" problem and the "wrong way" problem in the data transmission path, DUOR is improved to get more reliable and energy saving data transmissions.We compare DUOR with an exsiting depth-based routing protocol(DBR) by simulations. The proposed DUOR has less energy consumption and achieve high data packet delivery ratio, however at the cost of slightly longer end-to-end delay.