RLER: A Reliable Location-Based and Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have many characteristics different from terrestrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs), such as dynamic network topology, unreliable acoustic communication, which increase the difficulties in energy efficiency and reliability of data transmission, for traditional WSN solutions are not suitable for UASNs. Vector based forwarding (VBF) protocol is an energy-efficient routing protocol for UASNs, which uses the location information of nodes to limit the scale of flooding so that to save energy consumption and handle the mobility of nodes. In this paper, a reliable location-based and energy-aware routing protocol (RLER) is proposed. Based on VBF routing algorithm, it also considers the residual energy and the times of data relaying in last cycle time of a node to make more optimized decision whether to forward packet or not. According to the simulation results, more even energy consumption and reliable data transmission can be achieved, compared to previous VBF-based routing protocols for UASNs.