Overload Detection and Energy Conserving Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Communication

Abstract

The Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensors are facing several challenges due to their limited energy power that can significantly affect their network performances, hence the design of an efficient and reliable routing protocol for the underwater sensor communication is becoming the main purpose for the researchers, however, in this article, a new mechanism is proposed to balance the underwater network energy consumption due to the frequent data packet forwarding, whereas the protocol uses a method that is based on the historical nodes energy, where sensor that are excessively consuming energy are considered as overloaded node and has to be excluded from the forwarding process depending on their priority value. The implementation and simulation have been performed using NS-2 network simulator, based on the well-known protocol for the underwater acoustic communication ‘Vector-Based Forwarding routing protocol’, the results shows the performance of the proposed mechanism over the VBF in term of energy consumption and efficiency, successful delivery data, and end to end delay.