Energy Balanced Pressure Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

To adapt to the underwater application environment and extend network lifecycle, an improved protocol called energy balanced pressure routing (EBPR) is proposed in this paper. EBPR is based on void-aware pressure routing (VAPR). In VAPR, determination of beacon cycle is related to node velocity. However, the node velocity is difficult to get without assisted positioning system, and it has certain difference at different positions. EBPR proposes a different method to determine cycle based on sensor node's feedback without knowledge of node velocity. Besides, EBPR introduces the residual energy into the next hop selection process to balance energy consumption of node and postpone the sparse process of network. At the same time, a routing reconstruct mechanism is proposed to help node who missing the routing construct process to update routing information with the help of redundant information in aware packets. In this paper, we simulate the two protocols using OMNeT++. Result shows that two protocols have almost the same data delivery ratio. However, at the aspect of lifecycle, EBPR can extend by 10% ~ 30% under low water velocity. This advantage will decrease as the increase of node velocity, but not weaker than VAPR.