GARP: A Highly reliablegrid-based adaptive routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

We make use of the existence of cell-disjoint paths in the 3D grid topology to design a new highly reliable adaptive geographic routing protocol called Grid-based Adaptive Routing Protocol (GARP) for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks. In GARP, the underwater environment is viewed as a virtual 3D grid of cells. A packet is forwarded following a pre-constructed routing path from a node in a grid cell to a node in a neighbouring grid cell repeatedly until the destination sink node is reached. When a selected routing path becomes unavailable, GARP adapts to the condition by switching to an alternative path making use of the existing cell-disjoint paths. Since the protocol uses pre-constructed routing paths, it avoids path establishment and path maintenance overheads. Analytical performance evaluation results for GARP are obtained showing its high reliability. In tested cases, the delivery ratio has approached 100% when the network density has reached a minimum number of sensor nodes per grid cell.