UW-GRE: Underwater Greedy Geographic Routing by Network Embedding

Abstract

This paper presents the novel routing protocol called Underwater Greedy Geographic Routing by Network Embedding (UW-GRE) for underwater wireless networks. Geographic routing is a promising network routing protocol strategy for wireless networks because it is stateless. However, this routing strategy faces various problems in the underwater environment. This is caused by some challenging characteristics of this environment, such as its 3D nature and the no propagation of GPS signal due to high radio frequency signal attenuation. Accurate localization, void regions, and guaranteed delivery are then some of the problems faced by this routing strategy in this environment. In this paper, we solve those problems efficiently by using geographic routing over virtual coordinates obtained through a network embedding in an n-dimensional (n≥ 2) Euclidean virtual space. By properly embedding the network in this virtual Euclidean space, no geographic information is needed. We implemented the protocol on ns-3. Our results show that, when compared to a conventional geographic routing protocol with perfect localization information, our protocol improves the number of transmissions and energy consumption by up to or higher than 30%, end-to-end delay by up to 28%, while achieving similar network throughput.