MAC Protocol-Based Depth Adjustment and Splitting Mechanism for UnderWater Sensor Network (UWSN)

Underwater Sensor Network (UWSN) suffers from the limited batteries life of sensor nodes. Thus, some nodes will disappear from the network topology during the communication process which leads to isolated nodes and important buffered packets will be discarded. Traditional greedy forwarding protocol used in UWS N s are based on the selection of the nearest next-hop forwarder from the destination, that's the nearest one from the sea surface relaying the source and destination. By this, some nodes are selected by multiple source nodes, so their energy risk to be drained. In order to overcome this problem, we enhance this protocol by distributing the forwarding task between multiple next-hop forwarders. Also, this protocol is based on depth adjustment to solve the problem of isolated nodes. The source packet is splitted and each sub-packet is transmitted to a single upper neighbor node. Otherwise, multiple data channels are used to avoid collision between source nodes selecting the same next-hop node. Numerical results show significant improvement in greedy forwarding protocol performance.