MOR: Multi-objective routing for underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks

Underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks (UAWSN) are becoming more and more extensive, and different application scenarios have different service quality requirements. Routing protocols that can meet different traffic transmission requirements are vital to the application of UAWSN in different scenarios. Due to the harsh environment of the underwater acoustic channel, the routing protocol of the UAWSN should consider the characteristics of the underwater channels. In this paper, a multi-objective routing (MOR) scheme is proposed for UAWSN applications, and relay selection algorithms (RSA) are devised for delay-sensitive (DS) and delay-insensitive (DIS) scenarios to meet different quality-of-service (QoS). For DS applications, RSA selects the relays taking into account of the energy and delay affected mainly by MAC time, node congestion and hops of the nodes for connecting from potential candidate node to sink, while the RSA mainly takes energy consumption and reliability into consideration for DIS case to choose desired relay. The results demonstrated that the MOR outperforms VBF and QELAR in terms of delay and energy consumption for DS applications, while it is performs better in terms of delay, energy consumption, packet delivery rate and lifetime for DIS applications.