Geographic and Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are capable to explore the many unrevealed natural resources beneath the water, such as lakes, ponds, rivers, seas, and oceans. But there are so many challenges to be faced during the design of UWSN system due to the random nature of water waves. But, perhaps the most significant challenge in UWSNs is how to relay packets efficiently with minimum energy cost to the surface sink. This can be achieved by employing geographic and opportunistic routing schemes to transfer the packets at the surface sink reliably in cooperation with relay nodes. Considering these issues, we design a new routing protocol, called the Geographic and Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Protocol (GCORP), where data packets are routed from source node to the surface sink with the aid of relay nodes. In GCORP protocol, initially, a relay forwarding set is being determined by the source node on basis of depth data, then we use a weighting scheme to choose the best relay node from the relay forwarding set. The weight calculation is performed on normalized energy, packet delivery probability, and normalized distance of the forwarding node to the known surface sink. The main purpose of developing the GCORP protocol is to provide an effective solution for UWSN routing by improving the network metrics. We perform extensive simulations in NS-3 to validate the outcomes of GCORP protocol and compared them with other routing schemes with respect to packet delivery ratio, end-2-end delay, network lifetime, and energy consumption. The simulation results reveal that the GCORP protocol outperforms the existing approaches.