A Routing Protocol of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks for Instant Communication Applications

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) play an important role in tsunami, earthquake and other disaster early warning. The earlier the disaster warning signal is received, the more secure people’s property and life are. However, because the propagation speed of the acoustic signal is slow, UWSNs have the characteristic of long delay. In order to shorten the delay in UWSNs, a routing protocol for instant communication applications is designed (called R-ICA) in this paper. In R-ICA, each underwater sensor node contributes vector according to the delay from a sender to the sink node and its neighbors. The best next-hop is determined according to the size of the vector. To increase the deliver ratio of data packets, a loop-avoid algorithm is provided. The performance is compared with HHVBF and OVAR by simulations in NS3. Simulation results show that R-ICA has shorter end to end delay and less energy consumption than HHVBF and OVAR.