Routing In Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks Research Articles

ADRP-DQL: An adaptive distributed routing protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks using deep Q-learning

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) face unique constraints due to their unstructured and dynamic underwater environment. Data gathering from these networks is crucial as energy resources are limited. In this regard, efficient routing protocols are needed to optimize energy consumption, increase the network lifetime, and enhance data delivery in these networks. In this work, we develop an Adaptive Distributed Routing Protocol for UWSNs using Deep Q-Learning (ADRP-DQL). This protocol employs the ability of reinforcement learning to dynamically learn the best routing decisions based on the network’s state and action-value estimates. It allows nodes to make intelligent routing decisions, considering residual energy, depth and node degree. A Deep Q-Network (DQN) is employed as the function approximator to estimate action values and choose the optimal routing decisions. The DQN is trained using off-policy and on-policy strategies and the neural network model. Simulation results demonstrate that ADRP-DQL performs well regarding energy efficiency (EE), data delivery ratio, and network lifetime. The results highlight the proposed protocol’s effectiveness and adaptability to UWSNs. The ADRP-DQL protocol contributes to intelligent routing for UWSNs, offering a promising approach to enhance performance and optimize energy utilization in these demanding environments.

A hybrid path finder-based vortex search algorithm for optimal energy-efficient node placing and routing in UWSN

In recent times, the research community has demonstrated significant interest in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), where extensive sensor deployments in oceans and rivers aim to monitor the underwater environment. Energy consumption poses a primary challenge due to the difficulty of replacing or recharging batteries in these environments. Existing studies have employed K-Means technology to minimize power consumption in underwater transmission nodes. However, these studies have often overlooked the consideration of residual energy and void region creation in their optimization approaches. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel Hybrid path finder-based vortex search (HPF-VS) algorithm, utilized for cluster head selection and optimization of node locations and remaining energy. To extend network coverage beyond limited transmission ranges, inaccessible nodes at the network periphery employ the improved Dwarf Mongoose Optimization (IDMO) algorithm. Our proposed techniques demonstrate superior performance compared to existing methods, showcasing minimized energy consumption, reduced delay, improved packet delivery ratio, and enhanced throughput. Specifically, the proposed approach achieves a delay of 2.01 s and a throughput of 32.21 Kbps, surpassing the performance of state-of-the-art methodologies we benchmarked against.

Performance Evaluation of Underwater Routing Protocols DHRP, LASR and DFR for Underwater Wireless Sensor Network using MATLAB

Communication issues in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are the main problem. In this research paper and we proposed “Dolphin Heterogeneous Routing Protocol” (DHRP) and it determine the most efficient path to destination, it balance the energy and it increase the lifetime of nodes. Due to the lack of growth in underwater wireless communications, Communication cables are still used for underwater communication. The use of wires to ensure the communication of sensor nodes at the ocean's depths is extremely costly. In underwater wireless sensor networks, determining the optimum route to convey sensed data to the destination in the shortest amount of time has become a major difficulty (UWSN). Because of the challenging communication medium, UWSN routing protocols are incompatible with those used in traditional sensor networks. Existing routing protocols have the problem of requiring more energy to send data packets, as well as experiencing higher delays due to the selection of ineffective routes. This research introduces the Dolphin Heterogeneous Routing Protocol (DHRP) to tackle the routing issues faced by UWSN. The swarming behavior of dolphins in search of food is the inspiration for DHRP. In order to find the best route in UWSN, DHRP goes through six essential processes are initialization, searching, calling, reception, predation and termination.

Void Avoiding Opportunistic Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: A Survey.

One of the most challenging issues in the routing protocols for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is the occurrence of void areas (communication void). That is, when void areas are present, the data packets could be trapped in a sensor node and cannot be sent further to reach the sink(s) due to the features of the UWSNs environment and/or the configuration of the network itself. Opportunistic routing (OR) is an innovative prototype in routing for UWSNs. In routing protocols employing the OR technique, the most suitable sensor node according to the criteria adopted by the protocol rules will be elected as a next-hop forwarder node to forward the data packets first. This routing method takes advantage of the broadcast nature of wireless sensor networks. OR has made a noticeable improvement in the sensor networks' performance in terms of efficiency, throughput, and reliability. Several routing protocols that utilize OR in UWSNs have been proposed to extend the lifetime of the network and maintain its connectivity by addressing void areas. In addition, a number of survey papers were presented in routing protocols with different points of approach. Our paper focuses on reviewing void avoiding OR protocols. In this paper, we briefly present the basic concept of OR and its building blocks. We also indicate the concept of the void area and list the reasons that could lead to its occurrence, as well as reviewing the state-of-the-art OR protocols proposed for this challenging area and presenting their strengths and weaknesses.

Energy-Efficient Guiding-Network-Based Routing for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

With the increasing underwater applications, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have become a research hotspot. Routing protocols used to keep network connectivity and reliable transmission are essential in UWSNs. Due to the specific limitations in UWSNs, such as serious ocean interference, high propagation latency, and dynamic network topology, it is challenging to balance multiple performances, such as real timeness and energy efficiency in a routing protocol. To this end, this article proposes a localization-free routing scheme, termed energy-efficient guiding-network-based routing (EEGNBR) protocol, to provide a time saving and reliable routing for UWSNs, which is a good choice for applications characterized by intermittent connectivity. For reducing the network delay, EEGNBR cites the advantageous distance-vector mechanism and establishes a guiding network to provide underwater sensor nodes with the shortest route (minimum hop counts) toward the sinks. Moreover, EEGNBR innovatively replaces the waiting mechanism used in traditional opportunistic routing with a novel data forwarding mechanism named concurrent working mechanism, which could greatly reduce the forwarding delay while guaranteeing reliable routing. In order to ensure routing reliability as well as avoid duplicate transmission, the forwarding protection mechanism is adopted to save energy consumption and extend the service life of the network. Simulation results show that EEGNBR performs significantly better than some classical related protocols in terms of network delay while maintaining comparable or even better energy consumption and packet delivery ratio.

Cross-Layer-Aided Opportunistic Routing for Sparse Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks.

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have emerged as a promising technology to monitor and explore the oceans instead of traditional undersea wireline instruments. Traditional routing protocols are inefficient for UWSNs due to the specific nature of the underwater environment. In contrast, Opportunistic Routing (OR) protocols establish an online route for each transmission, which can well adapt with time-varying underwater channel. Cross-layer design is an effective approach to combine the metrics from different layers to optimize an OR routing in UWSNs. However, typical cross-layer OR routing protocols that are designed for UWSNs suffer from congestion problem at high traffic loads. In this paper, a Cross-Layer-Aided Opportunistic Routing Protocol (CLOR) is proposed to reduce the congestion in multi-hop sparse UWSNs. The CLOR consists of a negotiation phase and transmission phase. In the negotiation phase, the cross-layer information in fuzzy logic is utilized to attain an optimal forwarder node. In the transmission phase, to improve the transmission performance, a burst transmission strategy with network coding is exploited. Finally, we perform simulations of the proposed CLOR protocol in a specific sea region. Simulation results show that CLOR significantly improves the network performances at various traffic rates compared to existing protocols.

Energy-Efficient Depth-Based Opportunistic Routing with Q-Learning for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks.

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have aroused increasing interest of many researchers in industry, military, commerce and academe recently. Due to the harsh underwater environment, energy efficiency is a significant theme should be considered for routing in UWSNs. Underwater positioning is also a particularly tricky task since the high attenuation of radio-frequency signals in UWSNs. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient depth-based opportunistic routing algorithm with Q-learning (EDORQ) for UWSNs to guarantee the energy-saving and reliable data transmission. It combines the respective advantages of Q-learning technique and opportunistic routing (OR) algorithm without the full-dimensional location information to improve the network performance in terms of energy consumption, average network overhead and packet delivery ratio. In EDORQ, the void detection factor, residual energy and depth information of candidate nodes are jointly considered when defining the Q-value function, which contributes to proactively detecting void nodes in advance, meanwhile, reducing energy consumption. In addition, a simple and scalable void node recovery mode is proposed for the selection of candidate set so as to rescue packets that are stuck in void nodes unfortunately. Furthermore, we design a novel method to set the holding time for the schedule of packet forwarding base on Q-value so as to alleviate the packet collision and redundant transmission. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm and compare it with other three routing algorithms on Aqua-sim platform (NS2). The results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improve the performance in terms of energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio and average network overhead without sacrificing too much average packet delay.

Evaluation of the Performance of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks Routing Protocols under High-density Network

Nowadays, research and development of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) widely supporting various available application such as oil/gas monitoring system, tsunami monitoring, disaster prevention, and environmental monitoring has become increasingly popular among academicians and industries. However, to develop efficient communication in UWSNs is a difficult duty due to the irregular nature of the underwater environment. In our previous review [14], we did an elaborate theoretical survey on UWSNs routing protocols. In this work, we are going to evaluate the performance of some of the UWSNs routing protocols under high-density network condition. To simulate a high-density UWSNs, we are placing hundreds of underwater nodes in a small three-dimensional topographical area and study the behavior of the routing protocol and the network. We have chosen to evaluate some of the frequently addressed underwater routing protocols such as Underwater Flooding (UWFlooding), Vector-Based Forwarding (VBF), and Hop by Hop Vector-Based Forwarding (HH-VBF) under this high-density network scenarios. The result of our study shows that VBF and HH-VBF perform better in term of the number of packets received, dropped packets and PDR, while UWFlooding performs better in term of cumulative delay.

Overlay Networking to ensure seamless communication in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) finds its way actively in current researches where End-to-End communication is primarily focus with the notion of various expansion perspectives. Upgrading of machinery, equipments and sensors are involving for information and communication technologies. In general, data transmission from source to destination in underwater is asymmetric, i.e. transmitter and receiver section serves on distinct frequencies thereby complementing underwater communication. On the other hand, routing in UWSNs seems to be challenging this necessitates further exploration to complement underwater wireless communication in periodic manner. The research progressively needs to overcome certain limitations with Delay Tolerant Network (DTN) enabled JANUS (DTN-J) is an effective technique to ensure reliable data transmission which is crucial for underwater networks. A high efficiency microprocessor is widely been adopted in terms of decision making mechanism which complements for maximizing system performance. In this research, simulation results enhance the End-to-End communication and network lifetime together suggesting reliable tensor value which further assists to potential development in the field of UWSNs.

On energy efficiency in underwater wireless sensor networks with cooperative routing

In this paper, we exploit cooperative communication for designing an energy-efficient routing algorithm in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). Each network node is equipped with a single omnidirectional antenna and multiple node coordinates while taking advantage of spatial diversity. This research work is limited in scope to amplify-and-forward (AF) scheme at the relay node and fixed ratio combining (FRC) strategy at the receiver node. Cooperative diversity at the physical layer and multi-hop routing at the network layer enable us to formulate minimum energy routing as a joint optimization of the transmission power at physical layer and link selection at the network layer. Simulations results show that our proposed cooperative energy-efficient routing for UWSN (Co-EEUWSN) performs better than the selected non-cooperative routing protocols (depth-based routing (DBR) and energy-efficient DBR (EEDBR)) and cooperative DBR (Co-DBR) in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and energy efficiency.

Next Forwarding Node Selection in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs): Techniques and Challenges

The underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is considered a promising technology for collecting valuable data from underwater areas, particularly for aiding military operations and environmental predictions. UWSNs consist of underwater sensor nodes that have limited energy and use acoustics for communication. Routing in underwater sensor nodes is one of the challenging issues in UWSNs because of the need to forward data packets with minimal energy consumption and a high packet delivery ratio. Selecting the next forwarding nodes is one of the key components of routing in UWSNs and has a direct effect on energy consumption and the packet delivery ratio. Therefore, this problem has gained much attention from the research community with the intent of enhancing the performance of UWSNs. This paper qualitatively reviews routing protocols for UWSNs, focusing on the next-hop selection method and its strengths and weaknesses. A taxonomy is presented for reviewing routing protocols under different categories of the classification. A summary of the qualitative investigation is presented highlighting aims, the next-hop selection method, metrics, and priority considerations. A comprehensive investigation is carried out focusing on energy, link quality, void awareness, reliability, and shortest path characteristics. Finally, we discuss potential future research directions in UWSNs for forwarding node selection.

An Efficient Data-Gathering Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks.

Most applications of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) demand reliable data delivery over a longer period in an efficient and timely manner. However, the harsh and unpredictable underwater environment makes routing more challenging as compared to terrestrial WSNs. Most of the existing schemes deploy mobile sensors or a mobile sink (MS) to maximize data gathering. However, the relatively high deployment cost prevents their usage in most applications. Thus, this paper presents an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)-aided efficient data-gathering (AEDG) routing protocol for reliable data delivery in UWSNs. To prolong the network lifetime, AEDG employs an AUV for data collection from gateways and uses a shortest path tree (SPT) algorithm while associating sensor nodes with the gateways. The AEDG protocol also limits the number of associated nodes with the gateway nodes to minimize the network energy consumption and to prevent the gateways from overloading. Moreover, gateways are rotated with the passage of time to balance the energy consumption of the network. To prevent data loss, AEDG allows dynamic data collection at the AUV depending on the limited number of member nodes that are associated with each gateway. We also develop a sub-optimal elliptical trajectory of AUV by using a connected dominating set (CDS) to further facilitate network throughput maximization. The performance of the AEDG is validated via simulations, which demonstrate the effectiveness of AEDG in comparison to two existing UWSN routing protocols in terms of the selected performance metrics.

Energy-aware routing for delay-sensitive underwater wireless sensor networks

The energy reduction is a challenging problem in the applications of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). The embedded battery is difficult to be replaced and it has an upper bound on its lifetime. Multihop relay is a popular method to reduce energy consumption in data transmission. The energy minimum path from source to destination in the sensor networks can be obtained through the shortest path algorithm. However, because of the node mobility, the global path planning approach is not suitable for the routing in UWSNs. It calls for an energy-efficient routing protocol for the high dynamic UWSNs. In this paper, we propose the modified energy weight routing (MEWR) protocol to deal with the energy-efficient routing of delaysensitive UWSNs. MEWR is a low flooding routing protocol. It can tolerate the node mobility in UWSNs and achieve a low end-to-end packet delay. MEWR can provide lower energy consumption than the existing low delay routing protocols through the dynamic sending power adjustment. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of MEWR.

A Multipopulation Firefly Algorithm for Correlated Data Routing in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Low data delivery efficiency and high energy consumption are the inherent problems in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) characterized by the acoustic channels. Existing energy-efficient routing algorithms have been shown to reduce energy consumption of UWSNs to some extent, but still neglect the correlation existing in the local data of sensor nodes. In this paper, we present a Multi-population Firefly Algorithm (MFA) for correlated data routing in UWSNs. We design three kinds of fireflies and their coordination rules in order to improve the adaptability of building, selecting, and optimization of routing path considering the data correlation and their sampling rate in various sensor nodes. Different groups of fireflies conduct their optimization in the evolution in order to improve the convergence speed and solution precision of the algorithm. Moreover, after the data packets are merged during the process of routing path finding, MFA can also eliminate redundant information before they are sent to the sink node, which in turn saves energy and bandwidth. Simulation results have shown that MFA achieves better performance than existing protocols in metrics of packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, and network throughput.