EERP: An energy-efficient and reliable routing protocol for underwater acoustic wireless networks

Underwater acoustic wireless sensor networks are crucial for underwater monitoring, underwater development and national defense applications. In order to solve the problems of long propagation, high mobility, limited bandwidth, multipath and Doppler effect in underwater acoustic sensor networks, this paper proposes an energy-efficient and reliable underwater routing protocol. This protocol leverages the link quality information of each node for data transmission. When selecting the optimal relay, it evaluates not only the transmission success rate between the node and the next-hop node but also considers the link quality of the next-hop node and its neighboring nodes. This approach effectively reduces the likelihood of nodes encountering communication gaps. Moreover, the protocol incorporates the concept of relay node persistence, significantly reducing the frequency of handshakes between nodes and conserving energy. Ultimately, the efficacy of EERP was verified through MATLAB simulation analysis.