Evaluation of Focused Beam Routing Protocol for Different Applications of Underwater Sensor Networks

Most of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) applications are tolerant to delays and unstable links in the underwater environment, where acoustic waves are used instead of electromagnetic radio waves. In order to increase the delivery probability of the generated data, DTN routing protocols are used to forward data from the monitoring mobile sensors to collecting devices at the water surface. Based on the application, these data can have different frequency and different sizes. One characteristic of Routing Protocols for DTN is flooding of messages to increase the delivery probability. For instance, Epidemic Routing Protocol creates a copy of each message for each new node that does not already have the message in its memory. This increases the probability of delivery, but on the other hand, creates a lot overhead in each node’s buffer, and uses a lot of valuable energy from the forwarding and receiving nodes. In this paper, we evaluate FBR for different communication angles between forwarding node and the sink node (buoy), in UWSN by simulations. We use different application data patterns (sensor/location, control, media), to simulate sensor/location data, control data and multimedia data. Simulation results show that sensor/location data and FBR angle of 30\(^\circ \) has the best performance for our simulation settings.