LRP: Long-lifetime and Reliable Percolation Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UANs) have been shown as a promising technology to monitor and explore the oceans. Nevertheless, the routing design for data gathering of UANs considering the acoustic channel communication characteristics and limited energy is a pressing, open issue. To address this challenge, we propose the long-lifetime and reliable percolation routing protocol (LRP) for UANs to ensure the reliability of the network and prolong the network lifetime. The proposed protocol adaptively selects the forwarders to deliver each message. By estimating the reliability of the next-hop and considering the remaining energy of candidates, the proposed protocol takes a recursive approach to avoid trapping in a locally optimal solution. Simulations results validate the feasibility of the proposed protocol and demonstrate its superiority over the existing routing algorithms by prolonging the lifetime of LRP by up to 35%.