An Opportunistic Routing Based on Directional Transmission in the Internet of Underwater Things

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) has attracted a lot of attention because of its promising applications in underwater environmental monitoring; however, the characteristics of acoustic communication, e.g., long propagation delay and high attenuation, pose great challenges for efficient and reliable underwater data transmission. Currently, opportunistic routing is regarded as a key technology to improve the packet delivery ratio, because it can dynamically choose several forwarding nodes and leverage their cooperative forwarding to increase network throughput. However, choosing an excessive number of forwarding nodes may result in energy waste and lengthy communication delays. Therefore, an opportunistic routing based on directional transmission (ORDT) is studied to improve packet delivery timeliness and reliability and lower energy consumption. ORDT mainly contains three phases: 1) forwarding area division; 2) candidate forwarder selection; and 3) candidate forwarder coordination. The forwarding region is first established based on directional transmission. Only neighbors located in the forwarding region can forward packets. Following that, candidate forwarders in the forwarding region are chosen depending on their forwarding capability. Additionally, the chosen candidate’s time of holding packets is specified so that they might collaborate to reduce redundant data transmission and transmit packets to gateway nodes. Then, an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV) is employed to gather packets from gateway nodes. Simulation findings demonstrate that ORDT performs better than existing opportunistic routing in terms of packet delivery success rate, transmission latency, and energy usage.