An Underwater Layered Protocol Based on Cooperative Communication for Underwater Sensor Network

Underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is an effective method to obtain ocean data, and research on underwater routing technology has become a hotspot. However, in underwater networks, livability is an important factor affecting the overall performance of the network. Due to the noisy underwater environment and poor link quality, data integrity and network livability are affected. Cooperative communication is an excellent technology to solve this issue. In this communication, the source node sends the same data through multiple paths, and the destination node receives data packets that do not contain obvious errors. Therefore, in this paper, we adopt a cooperative communication method to solve the packet loss problem and the lifetime of UWSN. We propose an underwater layered protocol based on cooperative communication, adding the model of relay cooperation to the data transmission phase. Compared with traditional layered protocols, we use cooperative communication instead of ordinary multi-hop transmission, which can better guarantee the link quality of underwater channels. The k-means algorithm is used to cluster nodes, and conditional probability is used to select cluster heads. During data transmission, relay nodes will amplify the signal and backup the data packets to avoid dropping packets. We compare the proposed protocol with the non-cooperative protocol, and simulations show that the proposed protocol outperforms the non-cooperative protocol in the network throughput and lifetime.