Performance evaluation of congestion-aware routing protocols for underwater sensor networks with multimedia data

Performance advancements in acoustic communication technology have fostered to provide technical platform for numerous interdisciplinary applications ranging from bathymetry, hydrographic surveys, disaster prevention, to tactical surveillance over underwater sensor networks (UWSN). Supporting real-time data transmission over error-prone UWSN is increasingly important as these networks become more widely deployed. Existing UWSN routing protocols caters the requirements of non-real time applications where as delay sensitive applications requires solutions that can improve efficiency and reliability, often dynamically throughout the event detection and data transmission session. Congestion control is vital to achieve a high throughput and a long network lifetime. In particular, it is important for a routing protocol to provide congestion control by incorporating metrics like throughput, delay, packet loss ratio, etc. This paper presents a comparative analysis of UWSN routing protocols over real time multimedia data, using H.265/HEVC encoded video sequences. The aim of this study is to extend the in-built support in UWSN routing protocols for transmission of real time data traffic. The applicability of congestion control protocols in UW framework has been explored and the performance characteristics of the protocols have been studied under different multimedia load conditions with varying mobility. This methodology has been illustrated using the case studies in the military and ocean monitoring domains.