Delay Sensive Routing In Three Dimensional Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recent improvements in wireless communications and acoustic technology have enabled the use of sensor networks in underwater environments. Under-water sensor network is an emerging field which requires research in the field of channel access and routing. Some applications such as disaster prevention, assisted navigation and tactical surveillance require minimum delay in data-gathering. The routing algorithm proposed in this work for delay-sensitive applications uses a distributed approach. Each node in the proposed distributed rouging chooses its next hop. A local path repair algorithm is used to repair the links in a distributed manner. It enables faster recovery of node failure and link failure which increases the data-gathering rate. The best next hop is chosen to minimize delay, retransmissions of the packet already transmitted, idle source time and energy expenditure. Through simulations, the proposed algorithm is shown to achieve a better performance in data-gathering when compared to a centralized scheme.