An Efficient Data Collection Protocol For Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

This paper presents the design and evaluation of a new data collection protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks called the Data Collection Tree Protocol (DCTP). It uses an efficient distributed algorithm to proactively construct and maintain a data collection tree rooted at the sink node. The pre-constructed and maintained data collection tree allows the efficient selection of a single forwarding node at each hop when routing a data packet. We prove the correctness of the constructed data collection tree and we show that under some stability conditions, the constructed tree converges to an optimal shortest-path tree. Results of extensive simulations show a big improvement in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and energy consumption compared to the well-known VBF protocol. The simulated cases show increases in the packet delivery ratio between 20% and 122%, reductions in the average end-to-end-delay between 15% and 55% and reductions in the energy consumption between 20% and 50%. These results clearly demonstrate the attractiveness of the proposed DCTP protocol.