Adaptive Holding time and Depth-Based Routing for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

In Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), traditional enhancements of Depth-Based Routing (DBR) scheme rely either on increasing the network overhead or on the adoption of offline localization schemes to improve the network performance in terms of energy consumption, end-to-end delay or network throughput. Unfortunately, localization based techniques are very hard to implement in practice. In this work we show some preliminary results about the performance of a routing scheme called Adaptive Holding time and Depth-based routing (AHD) that we propose to dynamically adapt DBR configuration parameters. Specifically, we show a set of simulation experiments that suggest that networks implementing AHD show a reduced energy consumption with respect to those implementing the standard version of DBR. Simulations are performed by using our simulation library [8] of DBR [11] developed for the simulator AquaSim-Next Generation (NG) underwater simulator, which is based on Network Simulator-3 (NS-3). The characteristics of this library (detailed representation of cross-layer communications and operation modes of the modems) allows us an accurate prediction of the performance improvement of AHD with respect to standard DBR.