An Efficient Percolation-based Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

There is currently much activity within the oceanographic community to develop underwater monitoring sensor networks that include mobile, fixed, autonomous, and cabled nodes. Instead of single sensor processing, underwater applications have proven to use several sensors to get more accuracy and a wider range in data delivery. Multi-hops is the most realistic way to deliver data for underwater monitoring sensor networks. These pose several huge challenges to the routing protocol. 1) Underwater nodes have limited energy storage, flooding wastes a large of energy and can lead to network traffic crowd. 2) The routing protocols based on water depth are easy to trap into a locally optimal solution. 3) The underwater channels lead to an unstable connection, which makes the routing path unreliable. In this paper, we present an efficient PErcolation-based Routing Protocol (PERP) which introduces percolation theory to improve the reliability of data delivery and computes an efficient tradeoff between network reliability and energy consumption. The simulation results show it can increases the packet delivery ratio efficiently. When the reliability of PERP is similar to 90% of flooding, PERP's reliability is similar to 1.7 times that of the shortest path with relatively low energy consumption.