A Directional Selective Power Routing Protocol for the Internet of Underwater Things

Abstract

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) has lately gained popularity as a means of facilitating a wide range of underwater applications. In the IoUT, underwater communication is best accomplished by the usage of acoustic waves, whereas the terrestrial communication between the surface sinks and the on-shore control stations is typically achieved using radio waves. As a result, the greatest portion of an IoUT is enabled by the underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN), where the specific issues provided by the use of acoustic waves, the underwater node mobility, and the localization difficulties have yet to be addressed. In this paper, we discuss the challenges faced by the IoUT in terms of the currently proposed routing protocols and propose a Directional Selective Power Routing Protocol (DSPR) to cope with most of these challenges. The proposed protocol (i.e., DSPR) uses the angle of arrival and the sender depth information to find the best direction to the surface sink. In addition, the DSPR uses selective power control to enhance the delivery ratio and ensure connectivity while reducing energy consumption. To testify the performance of the proposed protocol, intensive simulation experiments have been conducted. The simulation results show that the proposed DSPR protocol outperforms two variations of the fixed directional routing (DR) protocol and the variable power depth-based routing (VDBR) protocol in terms of energy consumption and delivery ratio. For instance, the proposed DSPR protocol achieves at least 8 times enhancement in energy consumption compared with VDBR. In addition, DSPR saves around 30% of energy consumption over the DR protocols when the network is mobile. Moreover, the DSPR protocol acquires a delivery ratio above 90% for static/dynamic scenarios in both sparse and dense networks.