A Self-Adaptive Cooperative Routing Protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Design an effective routing protocol in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) is an important issue. Long propagation time and low DATA rate which are two major concerns for routing protocol design in UASNs will lead to the long end-to-end transmission time. This paper proposes a Self-Adaptive Cooperative Routing Protocol (SACRP) to effectively route collecting DATA to the sink in UASNs. Cooperative transmission in SACRP not only can enhance the link quality (Signal-to-Noise Ratio (SNR)) to improve the network throughput but also can increase the transmission range of a node to reduce the end-to-end transmission time. Some mathematical analyses about cooperative transmission scheme are done to support SACRP protocol in the different DATA size and transmission range as well. Based on the network simulations, the proposed protocol, SACRP, has a significant performance against the related work in average end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.