A Resilient Routing Algorithm for Long-term Applications in Underwater Sensor Networks

Underwater sensor networks will find applications in oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore exploration, disaster prevention, assisted navigation, and tactical surveillance. Underwater acoustic networking is the enabling technology for these applications. In this paper, the problem of data gathering for three-dimensional underwater sensor networks is investigated at the network layer by considering the interactions between the routing functions and the characteristics of the underwater acoustic channel. A two-phase resilient routing solution for long-term monitoring missions is developed, with the objective of guaranteeing survivability of the network to node and link failures. In the first phase, energy-efficient node-disjoint primary and backup paths are optimally configured, by relying on topology information gathered by a surface station. In the second phase, paths are locally repaired in case of node failures.