Impact Analysis of Different Scheduling and Retransmission Techniques on an Underwater Routing Protocol

Despite many advances in the area of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) during the last years, still many challenges need to be successfully tackled before large-scale deployment of underwater sensor networks becomes a reality. UWSNs usually employ acoustic channels for communications, which compared with radio-frequency channels, allow much lower bandwidths and have longer propagation delays. In the past, different methods have been proposed to define how a node must acquire the channel in order to start a transmission. Given the large propagation delays of underwater communication channels, a TDMA-based approach may need big time-guards. On the other hand, the very same large propagation delay increases the occurrence of the hidden terminal problem in a CSMA-based approach. In this paper, impacts of utilization of different scheduling and retransmission techniques on an underwater routing protocol will be analyzed. This analysis, in which energy consumption, packet delay, number of duplicate packets, and packet loss are considered, will be carried out by means of simulation using the Network Simulator 3 and a subset of EDETA (Energy-efficient aDaptive hiErarchical and robusT Architecture) routing protocol recently adapted to UWSN.