SDN-Enabled Energy-Aware Routing in Underwater Multi-Modal Communication Networks

Despite extensive research efforts, underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) still suffer from serious performance issues due to their inefficient and uncoordinated channel access and resource management. For example, due to the lack of holistic knowledge on the network resources, existing decentralized routing protocols fail to provide globally optimal performance. On the other hand, Software Defined Networking (SDN), as a promising paradigm to provide prominent centralized solutions, can be employed to address the aforementioned issues in UWSNs. Indeed, SDN brings unprecedented opportunities to improve the network performance through the development of advanced algorithms at controllers. In this paper, we study the routing problem in such a network with new features including centralized route decision, global network-state awareness, seamless route discovery while considering the optimization of several long-term global performance metrics. We formulate the entire routing problem of a multi-modal UWSN as an optimization problem while considering the interference phenomenon of ad hoc scenarios and some long-term global performance metrics of an ideal routing protocol. Our formulated problem nicely captures all possible flexibilities of a sensor node no matter it has the full-duplex or half-duplex functionality. Upon the formulation, we recognize the NP-hard nature of the problem for all possible scenarios. We adopt a rounding technique based on the convex programming relaxation concept to solve the formulated routing problem that considers full-duplex scenarios, whereas we solve the problem for half-duplex scenarios using a greedy method upon interpreting it as a submodular function maximization problem. Through extensive simulation via our Python-based in-house simulator, we verify that our proposed globally optimal routing scheme always outperforms three existing decentralized routing protocols (each of these protocols are selected from each of three prominent protocol types, i.e., flooding, cross-layer information and adaptive machine learning based, respectively) in terms of reliability, latency, energy efficiency, lifetime and fairness.

Automated summary

This study investigates the routing problem in underwater sensor networks and employs Software Defined Networking (SDN) to address performance issues by developing advanced algorithms to enhance network performance. The research findings show that the globally optimal routing scheme consistently outperforms existing decentralized routing protocols in terms of reliability, latency, energy efficiency, lifetime, and fairness.