Virtual Void-Based Marine Organism Protection Routing Protocol for Underwater WSNs

Abstract

Abstract With the progress and development of the Internet of Underwater Things, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have been showed as a promising technology to monitor and explore the oceans. Different from terrestrial WSNs, UWSNs adopts acoustic signals instead of radio frequencies for wireless communication. However, marine mammals’ frequencies are heavily overlapped with the frequencies used by UWSNs, where the noise of underwater acoustic networks (UAN) made by human may interfere with or even harm marine organism. In order to protect these marine organism, it is very necessary and urgent to develop an environment-friendly UAN and cognitive acoustic (CA) is considered as a promising technique. Based on this, aiming at not only protecting marine mammals, but also attaining optimal network performance, in this paper, we propose a virtual void-based marine organism protection routing (VMOPR) protocol for UWSNs, which is a location-based flow transmission scheme. Simulation results show that the performance of the scheme is better than the corresponding EEIAR and VBF protocol in terms of packet delivery ratio, throughput and energy efficiency when taking marine mammals into account.