Design of multicast protocol for underwater multimedia data transmission

In this paper, we investigate the multimedia data transmission in underwater sensor networks. With the development of underwater sensor networks, a large number of marine multimedia data, including audio, image and video, has been generated, which brings great pressure to the underwater sensor network. Although the researchers have optimized the underwater protocol in physical layer, data link layer, network layer and transport layer to improve the network bandwidth. The existing underwater routing protocols still cannot well solve the problems such as high energy consumption, low transmission reliability, high transmission delay, etc. Then a novel protocol is presented in this paper to achieve efficient multimedia data transfer in underwater sensor network scenarios, called load balanced routing protocol (LBRP). LBRP is essentially a hybrid approach of LBMRP and SDRT. It adopts the concept of network stratification, transferring multimedia data packets block by block and layer by layer. Simulation results show that the proposed LBRP can balance energy consumption of each node, effectively prolong the network lifetime and reduce transmission delay of marine multimedia data.