An efficient and reliable grid-based routing protocol for UWSNs by exploiting minimum hop count

摘要

The need for devising an energy-efficient and reliable routing protocol in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is still an open research issue. The characteristics of underwater environment and acoustic communications make the achievement of reliability and efficiency a challenging task. In this work, we develop and assess a grid-based protocol, termed an efficient and reliable grid-based routing by exploiting minimum hop count (ERGR-EMHC). ERGR-EMHC divides the network into 3-dimensional grid of cells, in which neighboring cells are classified based on their minimum hop count to the sink cells. Packets are forwarded in a cell-by-cell manner through some elected nodes called cell-heads. Furthermore, source nodes can adaptively specify the number of hops that the packet should not exceed based, for example, on traffic rate. Moreover, the protocol adapts a void handling mechanism to increase the reliability of packet transmission. Evaluation results reveal that the ERGR-EMHC significantly improves the energy consumption, average delay, packet delivery ratio and network overhead in all tested scenarios compared to VBF and GBPR routing protocols. In addition, ERGR-EMHC and GBPR improve the network lifetime compared to VBF protocol. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V.