Reliable and Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Under Water Sensor Networks

The authors proposed a Reliable and energy efficient Routing Protocol (RRP) for underwater sensor network, integrating the desired features of the Directional Flooding based Routing (DFR) and Vector Based Void Avoidance (VBVA) protocols. The new algorithm considers reliability and takes into consideration the residual energy for each node before choosing the forwarding node. RRP relies on a packet flooding technique to increase reliability. However, to prevent a packet from flooding to the whole network, they control the number of nodes forwarding a packet by measuring a link quality between nodes in a hop by hop. To mitigate the effect of the inherent void problem, the authors consider residual energy, link quality, and distance from destination node to choose a reliable path to forward packet to destination. The authors observe that RRP protocol has better performance in terms of the packet delivery ratio than the DFR protocol due to the void avoidance technique.