A Heterogeneous Network with Multiple Routing Protocols for Autonomous Underwater Vehicles

In this paper, we investigate and implement a heterogeneous underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN) with static sinks and mobile autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) cooperating together in coordinated missions. For the characteristics of the tasks that need multi-sink and multi-AUV cooperating together, Multiple Sink Hop-by-hop Vector-based-forwarding (MS-HH-VBF) protocol that proposed by us is adopted in upstream of the network, and the flooding routing is adopted for downstream and cooperation between AUVs. To measure the performance of the MS-HH-VBF protocol that improved from HH-VBF, we do a simulation on NS3 and compare the protocol with HH-VBF. We also conducted a sea trial to test the actual performance of this heterogeneous network in Dalian, China on 2019.06. NS3 simulations and data from sea trials confirm that it is a practical and effective network in specific scenarios.