A Localization Based Cooperative Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Localization is one of the major aspects in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). Therefore, it is important to know the accurate position of the sensor node in large scale applications like disaster prevention, tactical surveillance, and monitoring. Due to the inefficiency of the global positioning system (GPS) in UWSN, it is very difficult to localize a node in underwater environment compared to terrestrial networks. To minimize the localization error and enhance the localization coverage of the network, two routing protocols are proposed; the first one is mobile autonomous underwater vehicle (MobiL-AUV) and the second one is cooperative MobiL (CO-MobiL). In MobiL-AUV, AUVs are deployed and equipped with GPS and act as reference nodes. These reference nodes are used to localize all the nonlocalized ordinary sensor nodes in order to reduce the localization error and maximize the network coverage. CO-MobiL is presented in order to improve the network throughput by using the maximal ratio combining (MRC) as diversity technique which combines both signals, received from the source and received from the relay at the destination. It uses amplify-and-forward (AF) mechanism to improve the signal between the source and the destination. To support our claims, extensive simulations are performed.