LUM-HEED: A Location Unaware, Multi-hop routing protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Compared to land-based sensor networks, Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks have several new challenges, such as dynamic topology, limited network lifetime. To achieve long network lifetime, existing researches use clustering method to assure energy-efficiency. However, nodes far away from sink are easily to exhaust energy due to directly communication with sink. Besides, in HEED protocol, the nodes must be location-aware in order to communicate with the sink node. However, GPS radio receivers cannot function properly in underwater situation. Moreover, in industry, homogenous nodes with identical hardware are more welcomed concerning manufacture efforts and costs. In this paper, we provide a new homogeneous, dynamic topology adaptive, multi-hop routing protocol LUM-HEED (Location Unaware Multi-hop based on HEED) which suits for the real underwater situation and is more convenient and economic in industry application. Simulation results show that this protocol can prolong network lifetime and balance network traffic.