Routing schemes for underwater Ad-hoc sensor networks

Abstract

The underwater sensor networks have a large difference from that of terrestrial applications due to the unique characteristics of underwater communications like long propagation delay and low transmission data rate. In this project, we investigated the special features of acoustic communications and did simulations in the physical layer, the network layer and the power consumption issues, using OPNET Modeler. In the physical layer, we modified the standard radio model of OPNET of to simulate the acoustic channels. After that, we compared the performance of three most widely used ad-hoc network routing protocols which are TORA, DSR and AODV, and found out the most suitable one for underwater networks which is TORA. Lastly, we investigated the relationship between the distance between the sensor nodes and the required transmission power. We finally concluded that if we deploy more sensor nodes we could save the overall cost for the network.