Multi-sink opportunistic routing protocol for underwater mesh network

Compared with conventional oceanic monitoring applications, Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSN) can allow real-time monitoring of the underwater environment. In this paper, we propose a tiered architecture for the deployment of UWSN, where an acoustic mesh network is located between the underwater senor networks and central monitoring system such that it can act as the “backbone network” for sensor nodes. A novel routing protocol is designed specifically for such an underwater mesh network. This protocol is a best effort protocol where packets are forwarded along redundant and interleaved paths in a specified belt. In order to increase packet delivery rate, we adopts “multi-sink routing”, where the packet from a source node can be sent simultaneously over spatially diverse routing to multiple sinks located in different locations. Our simulation result demonstrated that our scheme could achieve high delivery rate without very high energy cost.