An adaptive multi-zone geographic routing protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

As a key enabling technology of underwater acoustic sensor networks, underwater routing feature a variety of unique characteristics, including limited energy supply, high end-to-end delay and low delivery ratio. All these problems pose challenges in the design of efficient and effective routing protocols. To address such challenges, we propose an adaptive multi-zone geographic routing protocol(AMGR). First, AMGR dynamically adjusts the neighbor information acquisition interval according to the topology change speed, which not only reduces the excessive energy consumption of updating information, but also improves the performance of routing in high dynamic underwater environment. Second, according to the characteristics of different forwarding zones, the multi-region cooperative forwarding mechanism is adaptive used to improve the end-to-end delay and increase delivery ratio under the premise of reducing energy consumption as much as possible. Third, in priority calculation, we consider both the impact of packet transmission advancement and energy consumption, which can ensure less hops and avoid some high advancement nodes running out of energy in advance. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol outperforms AHH-VBF, PCR and restrictive flooding in delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and energy tax.