An Adaptive Routing Protocol for Large-Scale Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Unlike traditional terrestrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs), underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) utilize acoustic waves to transmit data. However, acoustic waves in UASNs have features of high propagation delay, low bandwidth, and low data rate. These features also cause routing protocol to require more transmission time in UASNs compared to terrestrial WSNs. Thus, how to reduce the end-to-end delay as much as possible is an important topic. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol that could be applied to large-scale UASNs. The proposed protocol takes advantage of characteristics of acoustic waves to reduce the end-to-end delay. It could also ally with power control so that the overall consumed energy by the network could be reduced, thereby increasing the network lifetime. The simulation results show that the routing path of the proposed protocol outperforms other possible paths in end-to-end delay and hop count.