DORM: Distance-based opportunistic routing and medium access protocol for multi-AUV monitoring system.

In a multi-AUV (autonomous underwater vehicle) monitoring system, each vehicle uploads sensor data to the surface central control platform through underwater acoustic communication, and the control platform sends commands or task files to AUVs. For a multi-AUV system with many vehicles and a large-scale underwater network, it is a challenge to design protocols to achieve reliable, low-latency, and energy-efficient communication due to the unique characteristics of underwater acoustic channels. We propose a distance-based opportunistic routing-MAC protocol (DORM), which combines opportunistic routing and CSMA, using distance and hop counts information to determine backoff time and forwarding priority. We conducted simulation experiments to analyze the performance of DORM and compared it with P-AUV and Probabilistic Broadcast (PB). The results show that DORM ensures reliable transmission and has apparent advantages in latency and energy efficiency.