Recent events such as the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill have highlighted the need for ocean monitoring along a specific depth horizon. A mobile underwater acoustic sensor network drifting with the pollution pattern and reporting to radio-equipped surface buoys can provide wide coverage, real-time sensing and can be deployed efficiently. This paper investigates the feasibility of such a network application by evaluating the performance of two recent pressure routing protocols: Depth Based Routing and HydroCast for delivering sensed data from a depth-restricted layer of nodes. Previous work on these protocols has only focused on low-traffic scenarios with infrequent broadcasts made by nodes throughout the network, or with only one source node. A key contribution of this paper is an investigation of the effect that current drift has on networking. The performance of the routing protocols over time is measured, under a modified 3D Meandering Current Mobility model that takes into account lower current speeds with increased depth. Results show that even in a slow-moving coastal current, packet delivery in an initially dense network becomes unviable within 3 hours of drift. This work suggests controlled mobility management be investigated in future to extend network lifetime.
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Ren et al. (2012) studied this question.