CLIQUE: A Cross-layer Link Quality based Energy-efficient Routing Protocol for UWSNs

During the data transmission in underwater sensor networks, affected by the complex environment, especially when the network loads become large, data transmission collisions will be intensified, resulting in decrease in network transmission performance. Therefore, how to forward data to sink nodes with high reliability is a key issue. Link quality is one of the important factors that affect the performance of underwater communication routing. Poor transmission quality of link will lead to excessive retransmissions, leading to a low effective data packets reception rate. Hence, many routing protocols based on link quality are proposed in recent years. However less of them consider the effect of energy consumption and distance between neighbor nodes, which have the disadvantages of routing holes and uneven energy consumption. To this end, an energy-efficient routing protocol based on cross-layer link quality trust is proposed, which uses indicators at both physical layer and data link layer to comprehensively evaluate and predict the link quality between neighboring nodes from the perspective of overall network energy consumption balancing. The existing Link Quality based Routing Protocol is improved, and the routing node selection strategy is given based on the predicted value of link quality. The simulation results verify the advantages of the routing protocol in terms of data transmission success rate and energy consumption balancing performance.