Balancing Optimization for Underwater Network Cost Effectiveness (BOUNCE): a Multi-Armed Bandit Solution

UnderWater (UW) communications are challenging task due to their environment, which can cause high data corruption and loss. UW communication channels also experience limited bandwidth, high time variability and much longer delays as compared to traditional terrestrial channels. This leads to frequent retransmissions, which consume valuable energy for the network nodes and shorten their lifetime. One way to cope with these issues is to employ reliable smart protocols that can improve packet routing in a UW network to optimize transmission efficiency, minimize latency, save energy, and ensure network robustness. In this paper we propose BOUNCE, a novel routing algorithm for UnderWater Acoustic (UWA) networks based on Multi-Armed Bandit. The main goal of BOUNCE is to efficiently route packets to ensure the highest transmission quality, the least packet latency, all while keeping an eye on a fair-balancing of the network energy consumption. We run an extensive simulation campaign, and tested BOUNCE against two baselines, namely the state-of-the-art RLOR algorithm, and a random approach. The results demonstrated how BOUNCE is able to outperform the other baselines in terms of energy consumption and fairness, packet latency, and Packet Delivery Rate. More in detail, BOUNCE achieves a reduction of up to 9.5% in the energy consumption and of up to 41 % in the network latency, as well as an improvement of up to 27.5 % in the Packet Delivery Ratio.