RECRP: An underwater reliable energy-efficient cross-layer routing protocol

A reliable energy-efficient routing protocol plays a key role in underwater data transmission. In the face of acoustic communication challenges in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), including long propagation delay, topology change, limited energy, and communication voids, we propose RECRP, a Reliable Energy-efficient Cross-layer Routing Protocol to achieve high data delivery rate. RECRP is a location-free single-copy protocol. The information of the physical layer such as Doppler scale shift measurement, Received Signal Strength Indication (RSSI), etc. are adopted to estimate the distance, thus no extra hardware is needed for localization. Moreover, the overhead introduced by redundant packets is avoided with the single-copy mechanism. To improve the two-hop packet delivery rate and balance energy consumption among adjacent nodes, an optimal max–min method is proposed that dynamically controls transmission power and channel frequency. Furthermore, a surface to bottom routing establishment method is also adopted to handle communication voids. Compared with depth-based routing (DBR) and hop-by-hop vector-based forwarding (HH-VBF), RECRP is more energy-efficient with a higher delivery rate.