A High Spectral Efficiency Marine Mammal-Friendly Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Networks

In general, all the sensor nodes, marine mammals and other artificial acoustic networks share scarce spectrum resource in the underwater acoustic networks (UANs). To improve the utilization of spectrum resource, this paper proposes a high spectral efficiency marine mammals-friendly routing (HE-MFR) protocol for UANs, which making full use of the interlacing zone of frequency bands that marine mammals relied on and UANs operated on. According to various sound signal types produced by marine mammals, the proposed protocol adopts detour forwarding paths to transmit packets at certain times in order to avoid the interference between the sensor nodes and the mammals, and to shorten the distance of path at the same time. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol has significant advantage in energy consumption compared with the traditional bio-friendly cognitive underwater acoustic network routing (BF-CAR) protocol.