A Comparison of Two Data Delivery Schemes for Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) comprise sensor nodes that communicate over multiple wireless hops to perform collaborative tasks such as environmental monitoring, military surveillance, and oceanic exploration. Acoustic waves are used for underwater transmission, resulting in a communication channel that suffers from limited bandwidth, high delay, and high transmission loss. Existing data delivery schemes designed for terrestrial sensor networks are unsuitable for use in the underwater environment; relatively few new schemes have been proposed for underwater use, with no single scheme emerging as the de-facto standard. In this paper, we compare two data delivery schemes: vector based forwarding and the multipath virtual sink architecture, observing performance under various scenarios and evaluating characteristics from each scheme that are effective for use in underwater sensor networks.