Routing protocols for underwater ad hoc networks

Underwater wireless communications can enable many scientific, environmental and military applications. Because of the high attenuation and scattering effect of radio and optical waves respectively, underwater wireless communications are based on acoustic technology. The unique characteristics of the underwater medium - such as long propagation delay of the acoustic signal and extreme volatility of the link quality, poses unique challenges in the design of routing protocols for underwater acoustic sensor networks. In order to deal with this unreliable and unstable nature of the acoustic medium, authors in various literatures have proposed multi-hop data delivery routing schemes between the sources and the sink. However, these routing protocols are mostly dependent on the infrastructure of the underlying acoustic network making them unsuitable for pure ad hoc networks and hence limited in their applications. In this paper, we propose a routing protocol suitable for any kind of underwater acoustic sensor network, i.e. ad hoc networks. The protocol is generic in nature having traditional route discovery and route maintenance phase. The route maintenance phase is designed to reduce routing traffic. Simulation results show that the reduction of routing traffic improves the performance of the underlying acoustic network.