Abstract

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have the potential to empower smart ocean applications. However, the widespread use of UWSN applications has been limited due to the many daunting challenges incurred in underwater wireless acoustic communication. Moreover, underwater wireless communication is energy-hungry, which confines UWSN deployment to small-scale due to the risks and costs of missions for at sea replacement of the nodes' batteries. The energy harvesting capability of underwater sensor nodes is an important characteristic that has been overlooked in the literature. In this thesis, we study the data routing process in UWSNs with energy harvesting capabilities. We proposed a novel opportunistic routing protocol, named RELOR, that is the first in the literature to consider the energy harvesting capability of underwater sensor nodes during routing decisions. RELOR implements a learning framework for the best selection of the forwarder nodes based on the observed environment conditions. We conduct extensive simulations to compare the performance of the proposed protocol to the state-of-the-art solution. Obtained results show that RELOR outperforms the related work in terms of packet delivery ratio, end-to-end latency, and nodes’ energy consumption.