Link and Void Aware Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) are one of the emerging areas in the field of communication. There are several challenges in UASNs like energy-constrained nodes, low bandwidth, high propagation delay, high packet error rate, and communication void-node during routing. These challenges enormously causing problems to the delay-sensitive underwater applications. The major contribution of this paper is to design a routing protocol, which is referred to as the Link and Void Aware Routing (LVAR) protocol. LVAR protocol addresses the void-node problem by proactively avoiding such nodes during routing. Further, during routing sender selects the next-hop based on successful packet delivery probability. LVAR is implemented using a specialized underwater simulator-UnetStack. The performance of the LVAR protocol is compared with state-of-art Interference-Aware Routing(Intar) in terms of end-to-end delay and throughput.