Adaptive Data Delivery for Underwater Sensor Networks

With the rapid development of terrestrial wireless sensor network technology, and considering that more than 70% of the Earth's surface is covered by water, the increasing research focus on Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is not unexpected. Acoustic communications, which is the current viable transmission technique adopted by UWSNs, has a signal propagation delay that is five orders of magnitude slower than radio frequency (RF), and this has a major impact on protocols designed for RF networks. Moreover, the acoustic channel is prone to regional and unpredictable disruptions, resulting in temporal disconnections which can lead to excessive re-routing for conventional routing protocols. In this paper, we develop a data delivery scheme based on a novel multi-sink sensor network architecture with the goal of achieving fast and reliable data delivery in the harsh conditions presented by the acoustic channel. The scheme is designed to dynamically redirect packets when temporal link failures are encountered without requiring network state information to be updated. Using simulations, we showed that the scheme achieves robust and timely data delivery.