A distributed routing-aware power control scheme for underwater wireless sensor networks

During the data routing process in underwater wireless sensor networks, the communication ranges of nodes profoundly affect the network performances, such as energy utilization and delay overhead. Thus, in this paper, we design a routing-aware power control scheme for underwater wireless sensor networks, whose primary purpose is to assign a differentiated optimal communication radius for each sensor node. Compared with the existing studies, this scheme pays more attention to the combination of power control and existing opportunity routing mechanisms, the distributed implementation of algorithms, and the specific characteristics of underwater sensor network topology. The scheme consists of two main algorithms, namely, the rough adjustment algorithm and the fine adjustment algorithm. These two algorithms employ the game theory and the flooding mechanism to achieve the trade-off among network connectivity maintenance, routing performance promotion, and energy utilization optimization during the power control process. Based on the theoretical analysis, with the proposed algorithms, each node can adjust its transmitted power in a distributed, convergent, and low-complexity manner. According to our numerical simulation experiment, the designed power control scheme could improve the diverse networking performances, including the network lifetime, the packet delivery ratio, the energy efficiency, the load balance, and the end-to-end delay.