Balanced and Multi-objective Optimized Opportunistic Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater sensor communication medium has been motivated in the recent years, to explore probing targets in the area of interest within the ocean. The main challenge in acoustic sensor networks is to maintain the energy level balance among the nodes, throughout the entire lifetime of the network. Hence, a Balanced Multi-objective Optimized Opportunistic Routing (BMOOR) is proposed to forward the packet through multi-hop from downstream node to upstream node, so as to reach the sink at the surface. The proposed method refashions the nodes based on the dynamic estimations with respect to energy and the selection of optimal forwarders along the depth in a three dimensional network. In contrast to the existing techniques, the proposed protocol does not require spatial location, which is very expensive in UWSN. This in turn overcomes the fear of the single node getting trapped during greedy forwarding. The proposed method is further optimized using meta-heuristic, generation based bio-inspired algorithm (Bat) for delay minimization and delivery ratio maximization. Bat algorithm optimizes the opportunistic path by random fly with respect to fitness till it converges to an optimal pareto front, thereby the network lifetime is enhanced. Extensive simulation study using NS2 with an underwater simulation package proved that BMOOR contributes significant performance improvements over other representative UASN routing protocols.