EMGGR: an energy-efficient multipath grid-based geographic routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Routing in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) is an important and a challenging activity due to the nature of acoustic channels and to the harsh environment. This paper extends our previous work [Al-Salti et al. in Proceedings of cyber-enabled distributed computing and knowledge discovery (CyberC), Shanghai, pp 331–336, 2014] that proposed a novel multipath grid-based geographical routing (MGGR) protocol for UWSNs. The extended work, EMGGR, viewed the network as logical 3D grids. Routing is performed in a grid-by-grid manner via gateways that use disjoint paths to relay data packets to the sink node. The algorithm consists of three main components: (1) a gateway election algorithm; responsible for electing gateways based on their locations and remaining energy level (2) a mechanism for updating neighboring gateways’ information; allowing sensor nodes to memorize gateways in local and neighboring cells, and (3) a packet forwarding mechanism; in charge of constructing disjoint paths from source cells to destination cells, forwarding packets to the destination and dealing with holes (i.e. cells with no gateways) in the network. The performance of EMGGR has been assessed using Aqua-Sim, which is an NS2 based simulator for UWSNs. Results show that EMGGR is an energy efficient protocol in all simulation setups used in the study. Moreover, EMGGR can also maintain good delivery ratio and end-to-end delay.