Performance evaluation of ad-hoc routing protocols in underwater acoustic sensor networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs) is an emerging technology, comprising of sensor nodes and unattended automated vehicles (AUVs), all working in a collaboration to sense various phenomenon, process digital information, store processed data and communicate among each other and base stations. Acoustic propagation in water is characterized by high and variable delays, fading effect, Doppler spread and multi path which in turn lead to a limited bandwidth and high error rates. Also, battery life and storage capacity of nodes is limited. So there is a need of suitable routing protocol that takes all these limitations into consideration and makes communication in underwater networks viable. This is the first attempt to analyze the performance of ad-hoc routing protocols in underwater acoustic network environment. We used performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, average end-to-end delay, throughput, routing overhead and energy consumption of the sensor nodes. AODV, DSDV, DSR and OLSR are compared for their performance at different traffic conditions, number of nodes and depths. By analyzing our simulation results, we found that among the discussed protocols, AODV may be used for denser networks but with less traffic and DSDV is suitable for higher traffic conditions with optimal number of nodes.