PCon: A Novel Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Duty-Cycled Internet of Underwater Things

Abstract

Internet of Underwater Things (IoUTs) has emerged as an evolution of traditional underwater wireless sensor networks, with programmable nodes interconnected to the Internet. Despite the advancements, IoUTs will still face critical challenges imposed by the use of the lossy and energy-hungry underwater acoustic channel. Two major critical challenges faced by IoUT applications are the low reliable data delivery due to the poor quality of underwater acoustic links, and the high energy cost for underwater wireless communication. In this paper, we tackle both challenges by proposing the PCon protocol. The PCon is a power-controlled opportunistic routing protocol for data routing in duty-cycled IoUTs. At each hop, the PCon protocol selects the most suitable transmission power, from a set of discrete transmission power levels, to maintain a reasonable data delivery ratio while reducing the energy consumption of duty-cycled IoUTs. To do so, the PCon takes into consideration the energy cost for delivering the data packet, calculated as a function if the probability of having the next-hop node awake during the transmission. Simulation results showed that the PCon protocol, even in a harsh scenario of duty-cycling of 50%, ensures a packet delivery rate of 40% while decreases the energy cost in 78%.