VAPR: Void-Aware Pressure Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater mobile sensor networks have recently been proposed as a way to explore and observe the ocean, providing 4D (space and time) monitoring of underwater environments. We consider a specialized geographic routing problem called pressure routing that directs a packet to any sonobuoy on the surface based on depth information available from on-board pressure gauges. The main challenge of pressure routing in sparse underwater networks has been the efficient handling of 3D voids. In this respect, it was recently proven that the greedy stateless perimeter routing method, very popular in 2D networks, cannot be extended to void recovery in 3D networks. Available heuristics for 3D void recovery require expensive flooding. In this paper, we propose a Void-Aware Pressure Routing (VAPR) protocol that uses sequence number, hop count and depth information embedded in periodic beacons to set up next-hop direction and to build a directional trail to the closest sonobuoy. Using this trail, opportunistic directional forwarding can be efficiently performed even in the presence of voids. The contribution of this paper is twofold: 1) a robust soft-state routing protocol that supports opportunistic directional forwarding; and 2) a new framework to attain loop freedom in static and mobile underwater networks to guarantee packet delivery. Extensive simulation results show that VAPR outperforms existing solutions.