An adaptive cross-layer routing protocol for underwater acoustic networks

Abstract

This short paper presents an adaptive cross-layer routing protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks (UANs). The proposed solution, termed NADIR for Network Aware aDaptIve Routing, is fully distributed and self-adaptive. It supports the use of multiple coded modulation schemes and the usage of crosslayer information to interact with the physical layer. Link quality information is exploited along with energy and topological data in order to select the relay node to use. The protocol performance has been evaluated considering a challenging networking scenario, i.e., a polar environment, with very long propagation delays and a high probability of packet errors. The results show that the use of an adaptive strategy offers better network performance in terms of packet delivery and energy consumption in the presence of unreliable channels.