MF-HER: Marine Mammal-Friendly Based High Spectral-Efficient Routing for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

In real ocean environments, artificial acoustic and natural acoustic systems are coexisted to share scarce spectrum resources. In this paper, we propose a marine mammals-friendly based high spectral-efficient routing (MF-HER) protocol to improve spectrum utilization and protect marine mammal communications in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UW-ASNs), which makes full use of the interlacing frequency bands that are shared by both marine mammals and UW-ASNs. In the proposed MF-HER protocol, the detour strategy is adopted to adaptively avoid the interference of acoustic radiation from sensor nodes to the acoustic communication habits of marine mammals. Meanwhile, the non-detour strategy is adopted if there is no marine mammal or the marine mammals do not use the same frequency bands for communication in the sea area, and thus the sensor nodes can fully utilize the frequency bands without interference from the marine mammals. Due to the diversity of acoustic frequency bands used by marine mammals, the reasonable design of a routing protocol can shorten the distance of forwarding path and optimize the performance of UW-ASNs while protecting marine mammals. Simulation results show that, as compared to the existing bio-friendly routing protocol of UW-ASNs, the proposed MF-HER protocol can effectively improve the energy consumption of the sensor nodes, bit error rate, and network throughput, while avoiding the communication masking effect among marine mammals.