RUARP: Reliable underwater acoustic routing protocol for big data transmissions with low bitrate capabilities

This paper concerns the implementation and performance evaluation of a novel routing protocol tailored to transmit data that require a long transmission time considering real underwater acoustic communication constraints. Our solution, termed RUARP for Reliable Underwater Acoustic Routing Protocol, is designed to successfully deliver big data packets to a destination node overcoming the limitations imposed by the underwater acoustic channel and commercial modems. In addition, the protocol allows also to keep at bay end-to-end latencies and energy consumption by combining topology information (hop count) and channel quality estimation for every selected route. The performance of RUARP has been compared with that of two other protocols for underwater acoustic networks, namely the Channel-aware Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Wireless Networks (CARP) and EFlood, an enhanced version of the common flooding. Metrics of interest include the packet delivery ratio, latency and energy consumption. These metrics have been investigated through SUNSET SDCS-based simulations. Our results show that RUARP allows to deliver all the packets to a sink node while outperforming the other two protocols in terms of both latency and energy consumption.