DCR: Depth-Controlled Routing protocol for underwater sensor networks

Underwater sensor networks have recently been proposed as a way to observe and explore the lakes, rives, seas, and oceans. However, due to characteristics of the acoustic medium, efficient protocols for delivering data must exist. In this work, we propose a novel geographic routing protocol with network topology control for underwater sensor networks, that adjusts the depth of the nodes in order to organize the network topology for improving the network connectivity and forward data where the greedy geographic routing fail. The proposed protocol is the first geographic routing protocol for underwater sensor networks that considers the sensor node vertical movement ability to move it for topology control purpose. The simulation results show that, with the topology control, the fraction of disconnected nodes and nodes located into communication void regions, are drastically reduced and consequently the delivered data rate is improved. It achieves more than 90% of data delivered even in hard and difficult scenarios of very sparse or very dense networks.