Tier-Based Underwater Acoustic Routing for Applications with Reliability and Delay Constraints

UnderWater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs) are experiencing a rapid growth, due to their high relevance to commercial and military applications such as oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, and tactical surveillance. However, the design of efficient communication protocols for underwater sensor networks is still an open research problem because of the unique characteristics of the underwater acoustic communication channel such as limited bandwidth, high and variable propagation delays, and significant multipath and scattering. In this paper, we introduce a tier-based distributed routing algorithm. The objective of the proposed algorithm is to reduce the energy consumption through adequate selection of the next hop subject to requirements on the end-to-end packet error rate and delay. The protocol is based on lightweight message exchange, and the performance targets are achieved through the cooperation of transmitter and available next hops.