Dynamically reconfigurable routing protocol design for underwater wireless sensor network

Abstract

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) share the common challenges of terrestrial Wireless Sensor Network (WSN), however they are significantly different from terrestrial WSN. Mainly, because acoustic wireless communication is the main physical layer technology in UWSN. Acoustic communication offers longer range, but has limitations due to low speed of sound, high error probability, limited bandwidth capacity, node mobility and 3-dimensional network architecture. Most of the ground based WSN are static, however the UWSN condition keeps on changing due to water current and channel impairment. Therefore the UWSN must be able to dynamically reconfigure itself. The sensor nodes must be able to re-route their communication if the network configuration changes. In this paper we address a fundamental Networking layer issue by developing a dynamically reconfigurable routing protocol. It is a multi-hop datagram routing scheme which will offer reliable underwater wireless communication by dynamically re-routing the data, when network configuration changes.