A Hop-count And Residual Energy Based Opportunistic Routing For Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic sensor network(UASN)has been considered as a promising technique for oceanic engineering to explore and exploit marine resources.However,existing problems like low propagation speed,multipath interference and low available bandwidth can result in long delay,low packet delivery and high energy consumption.These problems are eager to be dealt with in underwater acoustic network.Based on the analysis of the UASNs characteristics,we proposed a novel protocol,named HCOR(A Hop-Count and Residual Energy based Opportunistic Routing protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks),which directs a packet to the sonobuoy on the surface in a simple but efficient method.Each underwater sensor node keeps its status of hop-count through periodic query-frame.HCOR selects a set of next-hop forwarder candidates and coordinates candidates based on the hop-count and the residual energy.The sensor nodes with less hop-count have higher priority.Hop-count is required to set up next-hop route toward the sonobuoy,which can help solve the problems of “void area” and the “long detour” in the data transmission path.HCOR doesn't need any geographic information which can reduce much signaling exchange.On the other hand,the energy of the sensor nodes with higher priority may use up prematurely because of excessive forwarding.To avoid this,HCOR considers the residual energy as one metric of the sensor node's priority.The sensor nodes with more residual energy have higher priority.This paper analyzes the network performance of HCOR of different sonobuoy numbers,different application scenario size and different communication range.In addition,this paper compares the network performance of three different protocols(HCOR,DBR,DUOR).Simulation results show that the hop-count and residual energy information can make HCOR achieves higher packet delivery ratio,lower average end to end delay and lower network consumption.