Location-Aware Multipath Data Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor

Abstract

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are becoming a critical research area for exploring underwater resources, maintaining marine ecosystems, and monitoring the health of marine species. These networks consist of various types of sensor nodes deployed to gather data on species health, marine environments, and other vital applications. The data collected by these nodes must be routed to floating sonobuoys, which then transfer the information to a monitoring station for further analysis. However, routing data efficiently over underwater acoustic channels presents significant challenges, including low bandwidth, high latency, and energy constraints. Therefore, an effective routing protocol is needed to optimize data packet forwarding and ensure better energy efficiency and a high packet delivery ratio (PDR) despite the harsh underwater environment. To address the limitations of existing routing protocols in UWSNs, this article introduces a novel Location-Aware Multipath Data Routing Protocol (LA-MDRP). Unlike traditional energy-based protocols, LA-MDRP leverages depth, angle, and location-based information to select the most suitable next-hop neighbors for data packet forwarding, ensuring that data takes the most efficient path based on geographic positioning. This location-aware routing optimizes data transmission paths by considering the relative locations of nodes, ensuring more reliable and efficient communication. Once the routing phase is complete, the data packets are forwarded directly to the next-hop forwarders based on the priority table, which is updated dynamically using location and distance metrics. This helps ensure that data is routed to the sonobuoys with minimal delay and maximal reliability. To evaluate the performance of the proposed protocol, key metrics such as packet delivery ratio (PDR), average end-to-end delay, and energy consumption were analyzed using MATLAB simulations. The results demonstrate that the proposed LA-MDRP scheme outperforms existing routing protocols in terms of a higher packet delivery ratio and a reduced average end-to-end delay compared to current state-of-the-art methods.