APSSR: Adaptive Packet Size Selection Based Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks offer very promising solutions to monitor the aqueous environments. Due to the distinctive characteristics of UASNs, it is very challenging to design a routing protocol that can achieve maximum data delivery ratio in the network. The main challenge is the communication medium (acoustic links) that is subject to temporary attenuation and high bit error rate (BER), which limits the throughput efficiency of the Network. Besides this, another major issue is the continuous movement of nodes due to water currents and the availability of limited resources. Due to nodes mobility distance among sensor nodes and consequently, BER varies, which have a direct impact on packet size, hence, leads to high packet loss and low data delivery ratio. To achieve a high data delivery ratio, the selection of optimal packet size is of utmost importance. Consequently, the selection of next-hop forwarding node based on optimal packet size is needed. Therefore, in this paper, we propose an adaptive routing protocol named Adaptive Packet Size Selection Based Routing (APSSR) Protocol for UASNs. APSSR determines the optimal packet size adaptively based on both varying distances between sensor nodes and BER and selects the next hop based on optimal packet size and BER. The simulation results show greater network performance in terms of Network Lifetime, Data Reception Ratio at Sink node, Average Network Delay, Packet Reception Ratio, and Packets Drop Ratio.