Radius-based multipath courier node routing protocol for acoustic communications

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) use acoustic waves to communicate in an underwater environment. Acoustic channels have various limitations such as low bandwidth, a higher end-to-end delay, and path loss at certain nodes. Considering the limitations of UWSNs, energy efficient communication and reliability of UWSNs have become an inevitable research area. The current research interests are to operate sensors for a longer time. The currently investigated research area towards efficient communication has various challenges, like flooding, multiple copies creation path loss and low network life time. Hence, it is different from previous work which solved certain challenges by measuring the depth, residual energy, and assigning hop-IDs to nodes. This study has proposed a novel scheme called radius-based courier node (RMCN) routing. RMCN uses radius-based architecture in combination with a cost function, track-ID, residual energy, and depth to forward data packets. The RMCN is specifically designed for long-term monitoring with higher energy efficiency and packet delivery ratio. The purpose of RMCN is to facilitate a network for longer periods in risky areas. The proposed routing scheme has been compared with depth-based routing and energy-efficient multipath grid-based geographic routing with respect to alive nodes left, end to end delay, delivery ratio and energy consumption.