A Quality of Service Aware Source Routing Based Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) handle many underwater applications such as environment monitoring, surveillance and navigation. These applications generate varied types of traffic such as continuous bit rate, sporadic and different packet sizes, leading to additional QoS requirements that are traffic and application dependent. This paper presents the development of a Quality of Service Aware Source Routing (QASR) protocol. QASR discovers multiple paths from the sources to the sinks and selects the most QoS compatible route among them. QASR is distinctive because it incorporates multiple QoS parameters such as Signal to Noise Ratio (SNR), latency and residual energy. Depending on which of these parameters are chosen, QASR has three variants, namely, QASR-Latency (QASR-L), QASR-Residual Energy (QASR-RE) and QASR-Signal to Noise Ratio (QASR-SNR). The performance of QASR protocol is compared against traditional source routing protocols, with simulations showing a reduction of about 10% to 20% in latency and about 5% to 10% lesser energy consumption than source routing. QASR protocol exhibits comparable performance to classic source routing protocols while simultaneously adhering to the QoS requirements of the application. It is also worth noting that the performance profile of all the three variants of QASR do not have sudden and drastic variations, with the performance profiles showing consistent trend-lines.