Adaptive Routing in Underwater Delay/Disruption Tolerant Sensor Networks

As an emerging technique, underwater sensor network (UWSN) will enable a wide range of aquatic applications. However, due to the adverse underwater environmental conditions as well as some system constraints, an underwater sensor network is usually viewed as an intermittently connected network (ICN) (or delay/disruption tolerant network (DTN)), which requires specialized routing protocols. Moreover, applications may have different requirements for different types of messages, as demands a smart protocol to handle packets adaptively. In this paper, we propose a novel routing protocol where routing is performed adaptively based on the types of messages and application requirements. This is obtained by exploiting message redundancy and resource reallocation in order to achieve different performance requirements. We demonstrate through simulations that our protocol can satisfy different application requirements and achieve a good trade-off among delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and energy consumption.