Improving the robustness of location-based routing for underwater sensor networks

This paper investigates a fundamental networking problem in underwater sensor networks: robust and energy-efficient routing. We present an adaptive location-based routing protocol, called hop-by-hop vector-based forwarding (HH-VBF). It uses the notion of a "routing vector" (a vector from the source to the sink) acting as the axis of the "routing pipe", similar to the vector based forward (VBF) routing in the work of P. Xie, J.-H. Cui and L. Lao (VBF: Vector-Based Forwarding Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks. Technical report, UCONN CSE Technical Report: UbiNet-TR05-03 (BECAT/CSE-TR-05-6), Feb. 2005). Unlike the original VBF approach, however, HH-VBF suggests the use of a routing vector for each individual forwarder in the network, instead of a single network-wide source-to-sink routing vector. By the creation of the hop-by-hop vectors, HH-VBF can overcome two major problems in VBF: (1) too small data delivery ratio for sparse networks; (2) too sensitive to "routing pipe" radius threshold. We conduct simulations to evaluate HH-VBF, and the results show that HH-VBF yields much better performance than VBF in sparse networks. In addition, HH-VBF is less sensitive to the routing pipe radius threshold. Furthermore, we also analyze the behavior of HH-VBF and show that assuming proper redundancy and feedback techniques, HH-VBF can facilitate the avoidance of any "void" areas in the network.