Movement assisted-topology control and geographic routing protocol for underwater sensor networks

Abstract

Underwater sensor networks have recently been proposed as a way to observe and to explore the lakes, rivers, seas, and oceans. A challenging issue in these networks is the communication, mainly due to the impairments of the acoustic transmission. Thus, efficient mechanisms to improve the data delivery must be proposed. In this work we present a novel anycast greedy geographic forwarding protocol and two topology control mechanisms. The proposed geo-routing protocol considers the anycast network architecture in the data forwarding process. The proposed centralized topology control (CTC) and distributed topology control (DTC) mechanisms organize the network via depth adjustment of some nodes. The simulation results show that with these mechanisms, the data packet delivery ratio achieves more than 90% even in hard and difficult scenarios of very sparse or very dense networks, the end-to-end delay and energy consumption per delivered packet is reduced.