Copper: Increasing Underwater Sensor Network Performance Through Nodes Cooperation

Monitoring underwater environments is still a hard and costly task. Indeed, electromagnetic and optical waves suffer high attenuation, being absorbed in a few meters and even acoustic communication presents low throughput and high bit error rate. Most of the existing approaches to enhance underwater communication performance relies on developing acoustic modems, multiple access to the communication channel and, data routing. In this paper, we present COPPER: a COoperative Protocol for PERvasive Underwater Acoustic Networks. COPPER synchronously/asynchronously works on top of TDMA method combined with an ARQ scheme based on selective repeat technique. It uses idle sensor nodes as relay nodes, enhancing communication space diversity. Our simulations show that, when compared to a non-cooperative protocol, COPPER enhances overall network performance metrics. For instance, it reduces packet error rate by 28.32% and increases goodput by 16.87% while spending less than 1% more energy.