Multipath Virtual Sink Architecture for Underwater Sensor Networks

The salient features of acoustic communications render many schemes that have been designed for terrestrial sensor networks unusable underwater. We therefore propose a novel virtual sink architecture for underwater sensor networks that aims to achieve robustness and energy efficiency under harsh underwater channel conditions. To overcome the long propagation delay and adverse link conditions in such environments, we make use of multipath data delivery. While conventional multipath routing tends to lead to contention near the sink, we avoid this caveat with the virtual sink design involving a group of spatially diverse physical sinks. Hence, we are able to exploit the reliability achieved from redundancy provided by multipath data delivery while mitigating the contention between the nodes.