WLQRP: A Weighting Link-Quality-Based Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Due to challenges posed by long propagation distances, high mobility, limited bandwidth, multipath propagation, and Doppler effects in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), the design of routing protocols faces numerous complexities. To enhance reliability in sparse node regions and reduce network energy consumption, this paper proposes a dependable and energy-efficient routing protocol termed WLQRP for weighting link-quality-based routing protocol. WLQRP leverages link quality information between nodes for data forwarding. When computing the link quality between nodes, it considers not only the historical transmission success ratio between nodes and their immediate relay but also incorporates the link quality between the relay and the relay’s next-hop nodes. This approach effectively reduces the likelihood of encountering void regions. Moreover, the protocol judiciously selects the next-hop node to improve transmission success rates, thereby minimizing data packet retransmissions and reducing energy consumption. We conduct MATLAB simulations to evaluate the WLQRP protocol, comparing it against the VBF (vector-based forwarding) and the HH-VBF (hop-by-hop vector-based forwarding) underwater routing protocol. Experimental results demonstrate that WLQRP enhances network performance in terms of data transmission rate, energy consumption, and end-to-end delay. These findings validate the efficacy of the proposed protocol.