A Novel Underwater Packet Flooding Protocol

Underwater acoustic communication networks often experience significant challenges that are induced by the oceanic medium. This medium often causes changes in communication topology that make advanced routing techniques out of reach for many current technologies. For this reason Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) often apply flooding, or restricted flooding, protocols to perform information diffusion tasks. The DFLOOD protocol is one of the most successful restricted flooding protocols used in UASNs. This work presents a protocol that improves on the duplicate counting and delayed forwarding methods of the DFLOOD protocol. This novel protocol is shown to produce a 16.09 percent mean reduction of duplicate messages when compared to DFLOOD in a network-layer simulation.