Time-critical underwater sensor diffusion with no proactive exchanges and negligible reactive floods

Abstract

Abstract-In this paper we study multi-hop ad hoc routing in a scalable Underwater Sensor Network (UWSN), which is a novel network paradigm for ad hoc investigation of the world below the water surface. Unlike existing Underwater Acoustic Networks (UAN), the new UWSN paradigm dispatches large number (in the thousands) of unmanned low-cost sensor nodes to locally monitor and report otherwise not easily accessible underwater events in a time-critical manner. Due to the large propagation latency and very low bandwidth of the acoustic channel, a new protocol stack and corresponding models are required as conventional approaches fail. In particular, we show that neither proactive routing message exchange nor reactive/on-demand flooding is adequate in the challenging new underwater environment. Unlike the terrestrial scenarios, on-demand flooding cannot be both reliable and efficient due to widespread collisions caused by the large propagation delay. On the other hand, as in terrestrial scenarios, proactive routing is more expensive and less efficient than on-demand routing in typical underwater environments. We propose a "conservative" communications architecture that minimizes the number of all packet transmissions to avoid possible acoustic collisions. This is implemented in the nonintrusive Under-Water Diffusion (UWD), which is a multi-hop ad hoc routing and in-network processing protocol with no proactive routing message exchange and negligible amount of on-demand floods. To achieve its design goal, UWD does not rely on GPS or power hungry motors to control currents. Instead, UWD is designed in a minimalist's framework, which assumes homogeneous GPS-free nodes and random node mobility. Our simulation study verifies the effectiveness and efficiency of our design.

E-PULRP: Energy Optimized Path Unaware Layered Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

“…10 and Fig. 11 show the performance comparison of the E-PULRP algorithm with the Underwater Diffusion (UWD) algorithm proposed in [16]. Throughput as well as average delay are estimated mathematically using (14), (24) and also determined empirically through simulations.…”

“…However, [14] considers a static node deployment and requires geographical information. An Underwater Diffusion (UWD) routing protocol based on community to community forwarding [15] is proposed in [16]. Even though [16] uses only controlled flooding, it does not ensure energy efficiency and waits for the complete path to be established to start the data transfer.…”

“…An Underwater Diffusion (UWD) routing protocol based on community to community forwarding [15] is proposed in [16]. Even though [16] uses only controlled flooding, it does not ensure energy efficiency and waits for the complete path to be established to start the data transfer. A geographical random forwarding routing scheme is reported in [17] and its energy and latency analysis is presented in [18].…”

“…If node does not receive ′ s broadcast control packet message, then it will broadcast the control packet as in Step 1 and the process will be repeated, until the packet reaches the destination. Network Model: To derive the design parameters, we consider the network model followed in [16] i.e. the total volume occupied by the UWSN in the region of interest is divided into a large number of small virtual cubes with a Binomial probability distribution for the occupancy of a node in a cube.…”

Mobile-MultiSink Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

“…In [7], a novel Path Unaware Layered Routing Protocol (PULRP) was proposed for dense 3D UWSNs. PULRP is proved to have higher PDR compared to the Under-Water Diffusion (UWD) algorithm proposed in [13] and Dijkstra's shortest path algorithm. However, a significant limitation in most underwater sensor nodes is low battery capacity.…”