The Cooperative-Communication Based Underwater Layered Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Network

Underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is one of the effective methods to acquire ocean observation data, and research on underwater routing technology has become a hot spot. However, the lifetime of UWSN is an important factor affecting the overall performance of routing protocols. Due to the uncertain underwater environment and poor link quality, it will affect data integrity and network survival ability. Cooperative communication is an excellent technique for solving such problems. In this communication, the source node forwards data through a cooperative path to improve network throughput, while the destination node receives data packets that do not contain obvious errors. Therefore, this paper provides a cooperative communication method to solve the packet loss problem and lifetime of UWSN. The underwater-layered routing network structure is adopted to divide the network nodes into clusters for energy balance. Compared with the traditional layered protocol, the cooperative communication can better guarantee the link quality of the underwater channel. The k-means algorithm is also used to cluster nodes, and conditional probability can select cluster heads. During data transmission, relay nodes will amplify the signal and backup the data packets to avoid dropping packets. The proposed protocol is simulated and compared with non-cooperative protocols (LDBR and MLCEE), the results show that the proposed protocol outperformed the other protocols in terms of network lifetime, throughput, energy consumption and end-to-end delay.