UWIA-AODV: Improved Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

In the past a few years, underwater acoustic networks have developed as a powerful technique used for variety of applications. Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) is a popular and effective routing protocol, while it is not suitable for underwater usage due to the features of underwater acoustic channel such as low data rate, long delay, limited bandwidth and energy. In this paper, we propose an improved AODV based on implicit acknowledgement which employs broadcast features of nodes to overhear packets and retransmit those that fail to be transmitted. In addition, residual energy is considerded for energy balancing. Finally, the in-field experiment results shows that our proposed protocol can select the route with more residual energy for energy balancing. And our proposed protocol also outperforms AODV in terms of throughput and packet discovery ratio. So it is more suitable for underwater scenarios that require high transmission reliability.