Performance and trade-offs of opportunistic routing in underwater networks

Underwater acoustic channel imposes many challenges into underwater networks communication, such as high bit error, temporary losses of connectivity due to shadow zones, limited bandwidth capacity and communication signal spreading over large areas. Opportunistic routing is a new routing paradigm that allows more than one node to forward a packet by taking advantage of the broadcast medium and overhearing of the packet transmission. In this paper we investigate the tradeoffs present in opportunistic routing for underwater networks. In one hand opportunistic routing may increase the time it takes to receive a packet, since there is an increase in delay to allow all the nodes that are possible forwards to receive the packet. On the other hand, opportunistic routing can help mitigated underwater challenges, by providing gain in packet reception and channel utilization. We provided an analysis of underwater channel utilization efficiency in opportunistic routing. We evaluated the performance on random deployments, showing that by using opportunistic routing we have a gain in packet reception and channel utilization in underwater networks.