Performance Evaluation of Candidate Set Selection Procedures for Underwater Sensor Networks

In recent years, the opportunistic routing (OR) paradigm has been shown as one of the most viable solutions at the network layer for efficient data delivery under the nosily underwater acoustic channel. Since then, several OR protocols for underwater sensor networks, with major and minor variations, were proposed in the literature. While the performance of these protocols, in terms of data delivery rate, delay, and energy consumption, has been extensively studied in the literature, there is a lack of studies devoted for the evaluation of the topological properties OR will incur. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of the candidate set selection procedures of opportunistic routing protocols designed for underwater sensor networks. We discuss the principles that have been extensively considered for the design of OR protocols for underwater sensor networks. Moreover, we conduct a simulation-based performance evaluation to study topological properties (e.g., number of hops, number of paths and number of candidates), which will impact the performance of underwater wireless sensor network applications.