Routing design avoiding energy holes in underwater acoustic sensor networks

Chaima Zidi (1, 2) , Fatma Bouabdallah (2) , Raouf Boutaba (3)

1 LIPADE - EA 2517 - Laboratoire d'Informatique Paris Descartes
2 Faculty of Computing and Information Technology
3 UWO - School of Computer Science [Waterloo]

Interest in UnderWater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASNs) has rapidly increased with the desire to control the large portion of the world covered by oceans. Energy efficiency is one of the major concerns in UW-ASNs due to the limited energy budget of the underwater sensor nodes. In this paper, we tackle the problem of energy holes in UW-ASNs while taking into consideration the unique characteristics of the underwater channel. We prove that we can evenly distribute the transmission load among sensor nodes provided that sensors adjust their communication range when they send or forward the periodically generated data. In particular, we propose a balanced routing strategy along with the associated deployment pattern that meticulously determines the load weight for each possible next hop that lead to fair energy consumption among all underwater sensors. Consequently the energy holes problem is overcome and hence the network lifetime is improved. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that addresses the energy hole problem in UW-ASNs.

Mots clés: UnderWater Acoustic Sensor Networks; routing; load balance; performance analysis; energy conservation

Domaines: Informatique mobile; Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Chaima Zidi, Fatma Bouabdallah, Raouf Boutaba. Routing design avoiding energy holes in underwater acoustic sensor networks. Wireless Communications and Mobile Computing, 2016, 16 (14), pp.2035-2051. ⟨10.1002/wcm.2666⟩. ⟨hal-01591951⟩