A novel opportunistic power controlled routing protocol for internet of underwater things

Abstract Internet of Underwater Things (IoUTs) has been proposed to collect data from aquatic environments, in a large-scale and autonomous manner. These networks currently consider the acoustic channel is as the most viable technology for underwater wireless communication. By using acoustic modems, underwater sensor nodes are capable of collaboratively sense the area of interest and report collected data to a monitoring center through multi-hop underwater wireless communication. However, underwater wireless communication through acoustic channels is daunting due to the limited bandwidth, multipath propagation, shadowing zones, high and variable delay, noisy environment, and high energy cost. These characteristics impair data collection and shorten the IoUT lifetime. In this paper, we propose a novel power control-based opportunistic (PCR) routing protocol for IoUTs. The proposed protocol considers the neighborhood density, link quality, distance, packet advancement, and energy waste to select the suitable transmission power level at each sensor node. Accordingly, each neighboring node eligible to continue forwarding the data packet is considered as a next-hop forwarder node if its inclusion in the next-hop nodes candidate set does not increase the energy waste in the considered hop. Numerical results showed that the proposed protocol improves the data delivery rate while maintaining the energy cost at levels comparable to the related work.