Practical Stateless Geographical Routing (PSGR) - 3-D Stateless Geographic Routing for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater acoustic sensor networks have recently gained increasing research attentions due to their vast potential applications. Although the limited bandwidth and power resources in such networks have made stateless geographic routing a favorable choice, the existing detouring strategies in geographic routing are either inefficient or simply fail in 3-D underwater environments. In this thesis, we propose the first stateless geographic routing protocol for 3-D networks, namely Practical Stateless Geographic Routing. The proposed routing protocol not only performs effectively in underwater environments but also degrades smoothly when the location information is either inaccurate or simply unavailable for a portion of nodes in the network. In addition, we propose a light-weight path pruning algorithm, namely Departed Tree-Branch Pruning, that can be combined with the proposed routing protocol to enhance the routing performance with very little overhead. The extensive simulation results have shown that the proposed routing protocol as well as the path pruning technique perform significantly better than the existing routing protocols for underwater acoustic sensor networks in terms of delivery rate, delay, hop stretch, and energy consumption.