DAPTS: A Depth Adaptive Packets Transmission Scheme for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

due to the characteristics of underwater acoustic propagation are quite different from terrestrial radio propagation, such as lower transmission bandwidth, longer propagation delay and more limit energy, it is essential to design an energy efficient packet transmission scheme with high network throughput and low propagation delay for underwater acoustic network. As the absorption coefficient of sea water changes quite sharply in different depth, how to find the optimal packet transmission path becomes a more challenging issue. In this paper, we propose a depth adaptive packets transmission scheme called DAPTS for underwater acoustic sensor networks. DAPTS takes into account not only the location of the relay nodes but also the energy consumption of the acoustic channel in different depth, which can save more transmission power. Furthermore, DAPTS choices the best node in the candidate forward nodes by the help of the shortest path algorithm, which improves the energy efficiency. To evaluate the performance of our DAPTS, three convention packet transmission method: the upward path, the straight path and the downward path are compared in terms of energy consumption. The experimental results show that DAPTS can find the optimal packet transmission path from the source node to the sink with minimum energy consumption, which is very suit for large scale underwater acoustic sensor networks.