A Beam Width and Direction Concerned Routing for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have been put significant attention recently from both academia and industry for undersea resources exploring and of scientific data gathering in underwater environments. The important characteristic of an underwater acoustic sensor network is that, most underwater acoustic sensor nodes have a certain beam width and a three-dimensional direction, is ignored by the existing underwater routing protocols. This characteristic will reduce the network connectivity and cause a large number of asymmetric links, so it will lead to the sharp decline of the existing protocol performance. We develop a Beam width and Direction Concerned Routing protocol (BDCR) to tackle this problem in UASNs. A key advantage of our protocol is that it can achieve relatively high packet delivery rate and ensure reasonable energy consumption when take into account the impact of the beam width and three-dimensional direction. The proposed protocol is compared with a representative routing protocol for UASNs. The simulation results verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed work.