DBR: Depth-Based Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks
Providing scalable and efficient routing services in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is very challenging due to the unique characteristics of UWSNs. Firstly, UWSNs often employ acoustic channels for communications because radio signals do not work well
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Abstract. Providing scalable and efficient routing services in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is very challenging due to the unique characteristics of UWSNs. Firstly, UWSNs often employ acoustic channels for communications because radio signals do not work well in water. Compared with radio-frequency channels, acoustic channels feature much lower bandwidths and several orders of magnitudes longer propagation delays. Secondly, UWSNs usually have very dynamic topology as sensors move passively with water currents. Some routing protocols have been proposed to address the challenging problem in UWSNs. However, most of them assume that the full-dimensional location information of all sensor nodes in a network is known in prior through a localization process, which is yet another challenging issue to be solved in UWSNs. In this paper, we propose a depth-based routing (DBR) protocol. DBR does not require full-dimensional location information of sensor nodes. Instead, it needs only local depth information, which can be easily obtained with an inexpensive depth sensor that can be equipped in every underwater sensor node. A key advantage of our protocol is that it can handle network dynamics efficiently without the assistance of a localization service. Moreover, our routing protocol can take advantage of a multiple-sink underwater sensor network architecture without introducing extra cost. We conduct extensive simulations. The results show that DBR can achieve very high packet delivery ratios (at least 95%) for dense networks with only small communication cost.
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Introduction
Wireless sensor networks have been used extensively in many land-based applications. Recent several years have also seen a rapidly growing trend towards the application of sensor networks in underwater environments, i.e., building underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) [1] [4] [6] [13] [14] [16]. Among many research issues in this new and promising area, delivering packets from a source node to a destination, namely routing, is one of the fundamental problems that need to be studied for constructing the UWSN protocol stack. In fact, providing scalable and efficient routing service in UWSNs is very challenging due to the unique characteristics of underwater sensor networks. A. Das et al. (Eds.): NETWORKING 2008, LNCS 4982, pp. 72–86, 2008. c IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2008
DBR: Depth-Based Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks
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First of all, radio does not work well in water because of its rapid attenuation. Thus acoustic communications are usually adopted in underwater environments. Acoustic channels often feature low bandwidths and long propagation delays. Thus a routing protocol with long end-to-end delays or high bandwidth requirements is not a good choice. Secondly, most nodes in a UWSN can move passively with water currents (except that some gateway nodes are fixed at the water surface or anchored at the bottom), resulting in highly dynamic network topology. To handle dynamic networks, existing routing protocols f
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