Review: A survey on routing techniques in underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater wireless communications can be carried out through acoustic, radio frequency (RF), and optical waves. Compared to its bandwidth limited acoustic and RF counterparts, underwater optical wireless communications (UOWCs) can support higher data rates at low latency levels. However, the severe aquatic channel conditions (e.g., absorption, scattering, turbulence, etc.) pose great challenges for UOWCs and significantly reduce the attainable communication ranges, which necessitates efficient networking and localization solutions. Therefore, we provide a comprehensive survey on the challenges, advances, and prospects of underwater optical wireless networks (UOWNs) from a layer by layer perspective which includes: (1) Physical layer issues including propagation characteristics, channel modeling, and modulation techniques (2) Data link layer problems covering link configurations, link budgets, performance metrics, and multiple access schemes; (3) Network layer topics containing relaying techniques and potential routing algorithms; (4) Transport layer subjects such as connectivity, reliability, flow and congestion control; (5) Application layer goals, and (6) Localization and its impacts on UOWN layers. Finally, we outline the open research challenges and point out the prospective directions for underwater optical wireless communications, networking, and localization studies.

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Underwater Optical Wireless Communications, Networking, and Localization: A Survey

This survey aims to provide a comprehensive overview of the current research on underwater wireless sensor networks, focusing on the lower layers of the communication stack, and envisions future trends and challenges. It analyzes the current state-of-the-art on the physical, medium access control and routing layers. It summarizes their security threads and surveys the currently proposed studies. Current envisioned niches for further advances in underwater networks research range from efficient, low-power algorithms and modulations to intelligent, energy-aware routing and medium access control protocols.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/14/1/795/pdf

Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks: Advances and Future Trends in Physical, MAC and Routing Layers

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have become more and more important in ocean exploration applications, such as ocean monitoring, pollution detection, ocean resource management, underwater device maintenance, etc. In underwater acoustic sensor networks, since the routing protocol guarantees reliable and effective data transmission from the source node to the destination node, routing protocol design is an attractive topic for researchers. There are many routing algorithms have been proposed in recent years. To present the current state of development of UASN routing protocols, we review herein the UASN routing protocol designs reported in recent years. In this paper, all the routing protocols have been classified into different groups according to their characteristics and routing algorithms, such as the non-cross-layer design routing protocol, the traditional cross-layer design routing protocol, and the intelligent algorithm based routing protocol. This is also the first paper that introduces intelligent algorithm-based UASN routing protocols. In addition, in this paper, we investigate the development trends of UASN routing protocols, which can provide researchers with clear and direct insights for further research.

https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/16/3/414/pdf

A Survey on Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network Routing Protocols

The paper concerns the definition and performance evaluation of a new multi-hop routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks Our solution, termed CARP for Channel-aware Routing Protocol, exploits link quality information for data forwarding, in that nodes are selected as relays if they exhibit recent history of successful transmissions to their neighbors CARP avoids loops and can successfully route around connectivity voids and shadow zones by using simple topology information, such as hop count The protocol is also designed to take advantage of power control for selecting robust links The performance of CARP has been compared with that of two other protocols for underwater routing, namely, the Focused Beam Routing (FBR) and a flooding-based solution (EFlood) Metrics of interest include packet delivery ratio, end-to-end packet latency and energy consumption, which have been investigated through ns2-based simulations and experiments at sea The in-field trials have been conducted at two European locations, namely, a Norwegian fjord and the Mediterranean Sea The tests in the Mediterranean Sea have been performed jointly with the NATO Science and Technology Organization Centre for Maritime Research and Experimentation (STO CMRE), under a collaboration agreement between the University of Roma and CMRE 1 Our results show that CARP robust mechanism for relay selection doubles the packet delivery

http://senseslab.di.uniroma1.it/administrator/components/com_jresearch/files/publications/CARP_A_Channel_aware_Routing_P.pdf

CARP: A Channel-aware Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Wireless Networks

Unlike terrestrial sensor networks, underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) have different characteristics such as a long propagation delay, a narrow bandwidth and high packet loss. Hence, existing path setup-based routing protocols proposed for terrestrial sensor networks are not applicable in the underwater environment. For example, they take much time when establishing a path between source and destination nodes due to the long propagation delay. In addition, the path establishment requires much overhead of control messages. Moreover, the dynamic and high packet loss degrades reliability, which invokes more retransmissions. Even though exiting routing protocols such as VBF were proposed to improve the reliability, they did not take into account the link quality. That is, there is no guarantee that packets reach the sink safely especially when a link is error-prone. In this paper, we therefore propose a directional flooding-based routing protocol, called DFR. Basically, DFR relies on a packet flooding technique to increase the reliability. However, the number of nodes which flood a packet is controlled in order to prevent a packet from flooding over the whole network and the nodes to forward the packet are decided according to the link quality. In addition, DFR also addresses a well-known void problem by allowing at least one node to participate in forwarding a packet. Our simulation study using ns-2 proves that DFR is more suitable for UWSNs especially when links are prone to packet loss.

DFR: Directional flooding-based routing protocol for underwater sensor networks

Unlike terrestrial sensor networks, underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) have salient features such as a long propagation delay, narrow bandwidth, and high packet loss over links. Hence, path setup-based routing protocols proposed for terrestrial sensor networks are not applicable because a large latency of the path establishment is observed, and packet delivery is not reliable in UWSNs. Even though routing protocols such as VBF (vector based forwarding) and HHVBF (hop-by-hop VBF) were introduced for UWSNs, their performance in terms of reliability deteriorates at high packet loss. In this paper, we therefore propose a directional flooding-based routing protocol, called DFR, in order to achieve reliable packet delivery. DFR performs a so-called controlled flooding, where DFR changes the number of nodes which participate in forwarding a packet according to their link quality. When a forwarding node has poor link quality to its neighbor nodes geographically advancing toward the sink, DFR allows more nodes to participate in forwarding the packet. Otherwise, a few nodes are enough to forward the packet reliably. In addition, we identify two types of void problems which can occur during the controlled flooding and introduce their corresponding solutions. Our simulation study using ns-2 simulator proves that DFR is more suitable for UWSNs, especially when links are prone to packet loss. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

(This paper is an extended version of our previous work presented in MTS/IEEE OCEANS 2008, Quebec City, Canada, September 2008.)

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/wcm.1079

Daeyoup Hwang

Papers

DFR: Directional flooding-based routing protocol for underwater sensor networks

DFR: an efficient directional flooding-based routing protocol in underwater sensor networks