Improving the Robustness of Location-Based Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks

TLDR

Underwater sensor networks rely on vector‑based forwarding protocols, where a routing vector from source to sink defines a routing pipe, as in the VBF approach. The study aims to develop a robust, energy‑efficient routing solution for underwater sensor networks. The authors propose hop‑by‑hop vector‑based forwarding (HH‑VBF), which assigns a routing vector to each forwarder instead of a single source‑to‑sink vector, creating hop‑by‑hop vectors that mitigate low delivery ratios in sparse networks and reduce sensitivity to the routing pipe radius threshold. Simulations show that HH‑VBF outperforms VBF in sparse networks, is less sensitive to the routing pipe radius threshold, and, with appropriate redundancy and feedback, can avoid void areas. Technical report UCONN CSE Technical Report: UbiNet‑TR05‑03 (BECAT/CSE‑TR‑05‑6), Feb.

Abstract

This paper investigates a fundamental networking problem in underwater sensor networks: robust and energy-efficient routing. We present an adaptive location-based routing protocol, called hop-by-hop vector-based forwarding (HH-VBF). It uses the notion of a "routing vector" (a vector from the source to the sink) acting as the axis of the "routing pipe", similar to the vector based forward (VBF) routing in the work of P. Xie, J.-H. Cui and L. Lao (VBF: Vector-Based Forwarding Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks. Technical report, UCONN CSE Technical Report: UbiNet-TR05-03 (BECAT/CSE-TR-05-6), Feb. 2005). Unlike the original VBF approach, however, HH-VBF suggests the use of a routing vector for each individual forwarder in the network, instead of a single network-wide source-to-sink routing vector. By the creation of the hop-by-hop vectors, HH-VBF can overcome two major problems in VBF: (1) too small data delivery ratio for sparse networks; (2) too sensitive to "routing pipe" radius threshold. We conduct simulations to evaluate HH-VBF, and the results show that HH-VBF yields much better performance than VBF in sparse networks. In addition, HH-VBF is less sensitive to the routing pipe radius threshold. Furthermore, we also analyze the behavior of HH-VBF and show that assuming proper redundancy and feedback techniques, HH-VBF can facilitate the avoidance of any "void" areas in the network.