A Stable and Reliable Short-Path Routing Scheme for Efficient Acoustic Wireless Sensor Networks (AWSNs)

Owning to the vital resources in a harsh and unforeseeable aqueous environment, the network stability and reliability in underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks (UAWSNs) have paramount significance. Stability guarantees the consistent performance of the network node’s energy consumption, avoids data loss, packets reception time and network lifetime. The reliability of packet ensures the selection of favorable channel and avoid adverse channel effects, and the vital information is easily obtained from data packets. This paper introduces two new routing schemes for UAWSNs; stable and reliable short-path routing (RSPR) scheme, and cooperative reliable short-path routing (CoRSPR). In RSPR routing, the destination node is selected by considering the weighting function parameters of the highest residual energy, highest SNR, lowest euclidean distance, and least number of neighbor nodes. The scheme reduces the energy consumption due to less number of nodes contribution in the packet advancement process. The RSPR protocol is a non-cooperative technique, where the packets are delivered using a single-path link, which may not be consistently reliable. To cope with this issue, the CoRSPR protocol is proposed, which takes cooperative routing into account, for stable and reliable data delivery. In cooperative routing, the reception of more than one copy of the data packet is involved by the destination node. This reduces the unfavorable channel effects during data delivery. The simulation results show that the proposed schemes achieve better performance in terms of dead nodes, energy left in the battery, packet acceptance ratio, successful receiving of packets at the sink and E-2-E delay.