Topology control and opportunistic routing in underwater sensor networks

Abstract

Oceans represent around 2/3 of Earths surfaces. It is estimated that 95% of their volume remains unknown by humans. In this context, underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have been shown as a viable technology for aquatic monitoring and exploration. However, these networks have low performance in terms of data collection, latency and energy consumption, due to the underwater acoustic communication characteristics. In this work, we propose jointly topology control and opportunistic routing solutions for improving data collection and prolonging UWSNs lifetime. Simulation results show that the UWSNs opportunistic routing performance is significantly improved by means of topology control, increasing the data delivery ratio and reducing the network energy consumption.