Geographic and Opportunistic Hybrid Routing Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks Based on Autonomous Underwater Vehicle

Aiming at the problems of underwater sensor networks (UWSN) such as high energy consumption, low transmission rate and narrow bandwidth, this paper proposes a geographic and opportunistic hybrid routing protocol (GOHRP) for UWSN based on autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV). In the initial stage, GOHRP designs layered networks with unequal spacing based on the depth of ordinary nodes, and selects the agent nodes of each layer according to the weight of ordinary nodes. In the routing stage, the ordinary nodes forward the collected data and value of information (VOI) reflecting the importance and timeliness of the underwater events to the agent node through the opportunistic routing strategy. Then, AUV adopts a dynamic routing strategy to visit preferentially the agent node with the largest VOI, and transmits the data on the agent node to the surface buoy. The simulation results show that GOHRP not only ensures efficient and stable data transmission rate, but also reduces network delay and improves energy utilization