Lightweight data transfer unified with active localization and robust routing in underwater networks

These days, the demand for investigating underwater area by using underwater sensor network is increasing. Compared with terrestrial environment, underwater communication has specific characteristics of low bandwidth and high packet loss rate. Hence, robust data transfer needs to be realized with lower network load by limiting the number of exchanged packets, reducing end-to-end data packet transfer delay, and so on. Moreover, as for network management, localization as well as routing is also required to be done successfully on more sensor nodes with low load. To realize localization and routing with low network load, the authors focus on an integration of localization and routing which saves redundant packet communication. In this paper, based on the integration, we propose an active localization and a robust routing to enhance success ratio of the localization and robustness of the routing, respectively. Moreover, we propose a new integration method where the transfer process of sensed data is also integrated with localization and routing to further enhance robustness of data transfer and reduce end-to-end packet transfer delay. Finally, we demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method by computer simulation.