Capacity improvements for reduced flooding using distance to sink information in underwater networks

With the aim of achieving robust acoustic underwater communication, the paper explores different efficiency enhancements of flooding-based protocols. Pure flooding is robust but suffers from high overhead, i.e., many duplicates are sent which saturates the network. More efficient flooding-based protocols are therefore needed. For network scenarios where most of the traffic is going to one or a few sinks, an enhancement that uses sink packets is proposed and investigated. A sink packet informs a node about its neighbours distance to the sink. The protocol with sink packets is compared to three other protocols and the results show that by using such sink packets it is possible to support higher traffic loads.