GCORP: Geographic and Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater Sensor Network (UWSN) is gaining popularity among researchers due to its peculiar features. But there are so many challenges in the design of the UWSN system, and these are quite unsustainable due to the dynamic nature of water waves. Perhaps the most tedious challenge for UWSNs is how to transfer the data at the destination with a minimal energy rate. It can be accomplished by exploiting geographic and opportunistic routing schemes to send the data efficiently to the surface sinks in cooperation with relay nodes. With this aim, we introduce a new protocol for routing, named Geographic and Cooperative Opportunistic Routing Protocol (GCORP). In GCORP, the packets are routed from the source node to the surface sinks in coordination with intermediate relay nodes. In GCORP protocol, initially, multiple sinks-based network architecture is established. Then, a relay forwarding set is being determined by the source node on the basis of depth fitness factor. Finally, the best relay is determined through the weight calculation scheme from the relay forwarding set. We conduct the simulations in NS3 to validate the proposed GCORP routing protocol concerning different network metrics. The simulations conclude that the GCORP protocol shows better performance than existing approaches.

Keywords

• Underwater sensor networks
• multiple sinks
• weighting scheme
• geographic routing
• cooperative routing
• opportunistic routing