A Co-Design-Based Reliable Low-Latency and Energy-Efficient Transmission Protocol for UWSNs

Abstract

Recently, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have been considered as a powerful technique for many applications. However, acoustic communications in UWSNs bring in huge QoS issues for time-critical applications. Additionally, excessive control packets and multiple copies during the data transmission process exacerbate this challenge. Faced with these problems, we propose a reliable low-latency and energy-efficient transmission protocol for dense 3D underwater wireless sensor networks to improve the QoS of UWSNs. The proposed protocol exploits fewer control packets and reduces data-packet copies effectively through the co-design of routing and media access control (MAC) protocols. The co-design method is divided into two steps. First, the number of handshakes in the MAC process will be greatly reduced via our forwarding-set routing strategy under the guarantee of reliability. Second, with the help of information from the MAC process, network-update messages can be used to replace control packages through mobility prediction when choosing a route. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has a considerably higher reliability, and lower latency and energy consumption in comparison with existing transmission protocols for a dense underwater wireless sensor network.

An Uneven Node Self-Deployment Optimization Algorithm for Maximized Coverage and Energy Balance in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

“…is the volume of area, and Qi is the monitoring area of sensor node Nsi. Due to the irregular shape of the effective monitoring area, it is a NP-hard problem to accurately calculate the volume of the effective monitoring area using Equation (3). In practice, the mesh-grid based approach is a feasible method to estimate the covered volume.…”

“…As mentioned above, in recent years, research on UWSNs mainly involves topics like node deployment [ 7 , 8 , 9 , 10 ], node localization [ 11 ], network protocol design [ 3 , 12 ], simulation [ 13 , 14 , 15 ], etc. Specially, the issue of node deployment has attracted attention from lots of scholars and engineers.…”

“…Acoustic communication is the main mode for UWSNs [1][2][3]. In recent years, acoustic-based UWSNs have been applied in lots of fields such as environment monitoring, military surveillance, data collection, etc [4][5][6].…”

“…In recent years, acoustic-based UWSNs have been applied in lots of fields such as environment monitoring, military surveillance, data collection, etc [4][5][6]. Research on UWSNs mainly involves node deployment [7][8][9][10], node localization [11], network protocol design [3,12], simulation [13][14][15], etc. Deployment of sensor nodes in 3D UWSNs is a crucial issue, which directly affects the performance of networks.…”

Brain-Inspired Data Transmission in Dense Wireless Network

“…However, in today’s network deployment the reliability plays an extremely important role. The messages have to be delivered correctly with a very low level of possible transmission failures [ 14 , 15 ]. In order to correctly assess the reliability of the proposed solutions, deterministic methods such as Fault Trees, Reliability Block Diagrams (RBD), or Markov chains are often used [ 13 ].…”