Location error resilient geo-opportunistic routing for void hole avoidance in USNs

Abstract

Underwater sensor networks (USNs) are getting popular for the purpose of monitoring and exploration of undersea terrain. However, underwater communication channel characteristics limits data gathering capacity and duration of monitoring. Efficient routing protocols can improve performance of USNs having dynamic topology and localization errors. This paper presents LETR; a geo-opportunistic routing protocol that considers localization errors and communication void regions. LETR considers transmission range levels for finding neighbor nodes. Sensor nodes search for neighbors by adapting different transmission range levels. The performance of our proposed protocol is evaluated against different parameters through simulations. The simulation results show that LETR significantly improves network performance in terms of energy consumption, packet loss ratio, fraction of void nodes and the total amount of depth adjustment performed by sensor nodes.