Minimum Delay Multipath Routing Based on TDMA for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network

Multipath routing is an alternative routing technique, which uses redundant paths to deliver data from source to destination. Compared to single path routing protocols, it can address reliability, delay, and energy consumption issues. Thus, multipath routing is a potential technique to overcome the long propagation delay and adverse link condition in underwater environment. However, there are still some problems in multipath routing. For example, the multiple paths may interfere with each other and arouse large end-to-end delay difference amongst multiple paths. This paper proposes a novel multipath routing structure and a conflict-free algorithm based on TDMA scheme. The forwarding nodes are selected based on the propagation delay and location information. This special multiple routing structure not only can ensure parallel multiple transmission without collision, but also can get a small end-to-end delay difference amongst multiple paths. Simulation results show that the multipath routing scheme proposed in this paper outperforms the traditional strategy.