Performance Evaluation of a Tree-Based Routing Protocol over a 3D Grid for UWSNs

Recently, a Tree-Based Routing (TBR) protocol for UWSNs has been proposed. It constructs shortest-path trees in a virtual 3D grid topology and uses them to obtain routing paths between sensor nodes and sink nodes. It has been claimed that due to the availability of these pre-constructed shortest-path trees, TBR is expected to outperform other protocols. In this work we investigate the validity of this claim by implementing TBR, evaluating its performance and comparing it to the well-known Vector-Based Forwarding (VBF) protocol by simulation. The delivery ratio and communication delay were measured under varying network density, node mobility and traffic load conditions. The obtained results show that TBR does outperform VBF (twice or more better) in terms of these measures. It was also observed from the simulation results that TBR performs better under low node mobility conditions. TBR consumes however more energy than VBF.