ENERGY CONSTRAINED RELIABLE ROUTING OPTIMIZED CLUSTER HEAD PROTOCOL FOR MULTIHOP UNDER WATER ACOUSTIC SENSOR NETWORKS

Underwater acoustic sensor network is an emerging technique consisting of sensor nodes, and AUVs all working together to sense various phenomenon, converts the sensed information into digital data, store the digital data and communicate to the base stations through the intermediate nodes. Also Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks are playing a main role in ocean applications. Unfortunately the efficiency of underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks is inferior to that of terrestrial sensor networks due to the long propagation delay, narrow bandwidth and high error rates. Also battery life and storage capacity of node is limited. Many routing protocols are proposed to improve the efficiency of Under Water Acoustic Sensor Networks. However their improvement is not enough, so there is a need of suitable routing protocol that consider all these limitations and makes communication in underwater network viable. In this paper, we propose a protocol called Reliable Routing Optimized Cluster Head (RROCH) protocol, a network coding approach for multihop topologies. We used performance metrics like packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, end-to-end delay and throughput of sensor nodes. LEACH, HMR-LEACH, LEACH-M are compared for their performance at different traffic conditions, number of nodes and depth. By analyzing our simulation results we found that RROCH protocol may be used for denser network with low traffic and HMR- LEACH protocol is suitable for higher traffic with less number of nodes.