A distance adaptive dual-hop routing algorithm for underwater optical wireless networks

Three main kinds of underwater wireless communication, which employ acoustic waves, radio frequency and optical waves, have attracted intensive research interests in recently years. Among them, the underwater optical wireless communication (UOWC) is characterized by high propagation speed and large transmission bandwidth. But, the optical waves in underwater environment are significantly affected by absorption and scattering effects, which limit their transmission range. In order to enhance the performance of UOWC, designing a transmission and energy efficiency routing algorithm has become a non-ignorable issue in UOWC. In this paper, a transmission distance adaptive dual-hop (TDAD) routing algorithm is proposed for underwater optical wireless networks (UOWNs) to improve their efficiency in packet-delivery and energy-consumption. Unlike the existing routing algorithms designed for UOWNs, which pre-set the transmission range of network nodes, the proposed TDAD algorithm adaptively selects the transmission range for each node according to the diversity of heterogeneous service requests and employs location and energy information in its dual-hop based routing procedure. Simulation results indicate that the proposed TDAD algorithm remarkably improves packet delivery rate with more balanced energy consumption when compared to the deviation angle-based single-hop (DAS) algorithm and the distributed sector-based (DS) routing algorithm.