Routing protocol for AUV communications: Report from field tests

Design of simple and efficient routing protocols for underwater acoustic sensor networks is a difficult subject because they have to cope with the challenging and variable characteristics of the water medium. With the participation of autonomous underwater vehicles in underwater networks, mobility has become a more important matter to deal with in protocol design. Adding to that, it is also not common to find relevant field experiments testing the performance of routing protocols. In this paper, two routing algorithms for heterogeneous underwater acoustic networks with mobile entities are presented which aim to maximize the data delivery while handling mobility. These algorithms have been tested at the Porto harbour using a heterogeneous underwater acoustic network composed of autonomous robots and static nodes. The results show that mobility can be used to obtain high data delivery rates.