Energy-Efficient and Topology-Aware Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater sensor networks were recently proposed to support quite a few aquatic applications such as ocean exploration and harbor monitoring. Different from terrestrial WSNs, the underwater sensor networks have many unique characteristics, such as greater propagation delay, higher dynamic topology and sparse node density. These features bring many new challenges to the protocol design of underwater sensor networks, especially the routing protocols. In this paper, we propose SEANAR, an energy-efficient and topology-aware routing protocol for underwater sensor networks. SEANAR relies on topology information, in specific, degree information of neighboring nodes for making routing decisions. Although this is a simple greedy approach, simulation results show that, compared with Greedy Forwarding and VBF-based routing protocol, SEANAR achieves much higher packet delivery ratio, while keeps the energy consumption in a very low level.