Path Selection Based On Residual Energy And Link Quality In Underwater Wireless Sensor Network

Underwater wireless sensor network(UWSN) consists of a series of sensor nodes with acoustic communication and numeracy capacities for underwater detection, with wide application fields such as marine resource investigation, water pollution detection, marine seismic monitoring, and surveillance. Sound with low propagation speed in water is the transmission medium of UWSN, and data is often transmitted to the base station through multiple forwarding. Since the UWSN itself has limited energy, high latency, low bandwidth, signal attenuation, unstable channel quality, so the research of path selection in UWSN will face enormous challenges.Currently the routing protocols in UWSN, for example, VBF and HHVBF, are usually simply based on location to carry out data forwarding, causing no forwarding path be found in sparse network, or numerous nodes involved in the process when nodes are intensive, resulting in poor network performance. This paper proposed a cross-layer path selection algorithm based on residual energy and link quality. Exponential smoothing method was used to predict the link quality between nodes. Combined with residual energy, we further proposed the node quality factor. By selecting the node with the maximum value of quality factor as the next hop, our path selection algorithm could balance the network energy consumption, thus improving the success rate of data transmission and prolonging the lifetime of the network.We used the Aqua-Sim to evaluate the performance of this algorithm. We first selected the optimal parameter values of the link quality prediction factor and the node quality factor, and then compared our path selection algorithm with VBF, HHVBF and RHHVBF. Experiments showed that our algorithm owned a better performance in terms of the success rate and survival time compared with VBF and HHVBF.