An Efficient Routing Scheme Based on Node Density for Underwater Acoustic Sensors Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensors Networks (UWSNs) are deployed in remotely monitored environment such as water level monitoring, ocean current identification, oil detection, habitat monitoring and numerous military applications. Providing scalable and efficient routing is very challenging in UWSNs due to the harsh underwater environment. The biggest difficulties are the nodes inherent movement due to water current, long delay in data transmission, low bandwidth of the acoustic signal, high error rate and energy scarcity in battery powered nodes. Many routing protocols have been proposed to solve the aforementioned problems. There are three broad categories of routing protocols namely depth based, energy based and vector -based routing. Vector Based Forwarding protocols perform routing through virtual pipeline by defining their radius which give proper direction to packets communication. We proposed a routing protocol termed as Path -Oriented Energy Scaled Expanded Vector Based Forwarding (PESEVBF). PESEVBF takes into account all parameters; holding time, the source nodes packets routing path and void holes creation on the second hop; PESEVBF not only considers the packet upward advancement but also focus on density of the forwarded nodes in terms of number of potential forwarding and suppressed nodes for path selection. Node selection in resultant holding time is based on minimum Path Factor (PF) value. Moreover, the suppressed node will be selected for packet forwarding to avoid the void holes occurrences on the second hop. Performance of PESEVBF is compared with other routing protocols using matrices such as energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, packets dropping ratio and duplicate packets creation indicating considerable performance improvement.