Bargaining Game-Based Opportunistic Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

Due to the low bandwidth, high latency, and high communication energy cost of acoustic channel communication, data collection in underwater sensor networks is still severely limited, and it is particularly important to design an efficient and reliable routing protocol. Depth-based opportunistic routing has garnered significant attention due to its lack of reliance on 3-D geographic coordinates. Nevertheless, it suffers from the problems of void region and high energy consumption. In this paper, we propose an opportunistic routing protocol for underwater sensor networks based on the bargaining game. The protocol regards source and relay nodes as buyers and sellers, respectively, and establishes a multi-stage bargaining game model. In the phase of selecting the optimal relay set, the source and relay nodes make the decision of maximum payoff based on subgame perfect equilibrium to balance the energy consumption of the nodes. Subsequently, we introduce a recovery model to effectively mitigate the void region and long detour problems. In addition, an associated dynamic timing forwarding mechanism is set up to calculate timing based on node pricing and packet delivery probability, reducing end-to-end delay. Simulation results show that the proposed method significantly improves the network performance when compared with other representative underwater routing protocols.