Collaborative Routing Maintenance Method for Dynamic Route of Marine Mobile Wireless Sensor Networks

Marine mobile wireless sensor networks (MMWSN) are low-cost and self-organizing marine data observing networks. The networks are applied for sea-surface ecological environment observation, and data is transmitted by multi-hop routing path between Buoy Sinks and sensors nodes. Due to high mobility and frequent topology changes of sensor nodes in complex marine environment, the dynamic routing problem under energy constraints needs to be solved urgently. The paper pro-vides a Collaborative Routing Maintenance (CRM) method to deal with dynamic routing problem of MMWSN, including the Potential Field Depth (PFD) algorithm and Routing Collaboration & Recovery (RCR) algorithm. The periodically broadcast depth message of PFD can effec-tively route sensor node towards Sink direction. The RCR algorithm could maintain dynamic routing according to network channel link quality. If the link is poor, it could select collaborative relay nodes for collaborative data transmission. Else if the link is broken, it would repair route by selecting optimal relay node to form alternative route path, to handle node failure or congestion on sea surface. Simulation results verify that the proposed method outperforms the pre-existing protocols in terms of energy consumption, packet delivery ratio, and delay.