Improving the robustness of location-based routing for underwater sensor networks

This paper investigates a fundamental networking problem in underwater sensor networks: robust and energy-efficient routing. We present an adaptive location-based routing protocol, called hop-by-hop vector-based-forwarding (HH-VBF). It uses the notion of a "routing vector" (a vector from the source to the sink) acting as the axis of the "routing pipe", similar to the vector based forward (VBF) routing in [11]. Unlike the original VBF approach, however, HH-VBF suggests the use of a routing vector for each individual forwarder in the network, instead of a single network-wide source-to-sink routing vector. By the creation of the hop-by-hop vectors, HH-VBF can overcome two major problems in VBF: (1) too small data delivery ratio for sparse networks; (2) too sensitive to "routing pipe" radius threshold. We conduct simulations to evaluate HH-VBF, and the results show that HH-VBF yields much better performance than VBF in sparse networks. In addition, HH-VBF is less sensitive to the routing pipe radius threshold. Furthermore, we also analyze the behavior of HH-VBF and show that assuming proper redundancy and feedback techniques, HH-VBF can facilitate the avoidance of any "void" areas in the network.