A Game-Theoretic Routing Protocol for 3-D Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

As a key technology of the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have attracted considerable attention from both academia and industry. Due to specific characteristics of UWSNs, such as high latency, high mobility, and limited bandwidth, it is a challenge to design routing protocols for 3-D UASNs. In order to address these challenges, here, we propose a game-theoretic routing protocol (GTRP) for 3-D UASNs. First, the GTRP defines a forwarding area making the nodes closer to the destination inclined to forward. Then, it estimates the node degree in the forwarding area without broadcasting prior message periodically. Third, GTRP regards the forwarding process as a game. The number of participants in the game is the node degree information in the forwarding area, instead of the number of actual neighbors. To test the effectiveness of the proposed GTRP, we implement it and evaluate its performance in the Aqua-sim. The extensive simulations results indicate that GTRP significantly outperforms various existing protocols used for comparison, in terms of the number of received packets, the packet delivery fraction, and the end-to-end delay.