A reliable and energy efficient VBF-improved cross-layer protocol for underwater acoustic sensor network

Underwater sensor networks (USNs) has many characteristics different from terrestrial wireless sensor networks (WSNs), such as dynamic network topology, unreliable acoustic communication, which increases the difficulty in energy efficiency and reliability of data transmission, for traditional WSN protocols are not suitable for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). Vector based forwarding (VBF) protocol is an energy efficient routing protocol for UASNs, by using the location information of nodes to limit the scale of flooding so that to save energy consumption and handle the mobility of nodes. In this paper a cross-layer protocol is proposed, which not only utilizes the VBF-based routing algorithm, but also considers the residual energy and the times of data relay in a cycle time to make more optimized decision whether a node will forward data or not. According to the simulation results, more evenly energy consumption and reliable data transmission are achieved, compared to previous VBF-based routing protocols for UASNs.