CITP: Collision and Interruption Tolerant Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

In underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), the spatially and temporally varying acoustic channel causes random route interruptions and transmission void region. Further, the long propagation delay of acoustic links causes complicated randomness of packet collisions. Inspired by the unpredictability of both route interruptions and packet collisions in UASNs, a collision and interruption tolerant protocol (CITP) is proposed to jointly address the two challenges in a smart way. By exploiting the opportunistic transmission strategy, CITP forms the optimized route on the fly, which bypasses nodes that undergo collisions or interrupted links and void regions. Simulation results show that CITP achieves a high packet delivery ratio with reduced energy consumption.