Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have aroused increasing interest of many researchers in industry, military, commerce and academe recently. Due to the harsh underwater environment, energy efficiency is a significant theme should be considered for routing in UWSNs. Underwater positioning is also a particularly tricky task since the high attenuation of radio-frequency signals in UWSNs. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient depth-based opportunistic routing algorithm with Q-learning (EDORQ) for UWSNs to guarantee the energy-saving and reliable data transmission. It combines the respective advantages of Q-learning technique and opportunistic routing (OR) algorithm without the full-dimensional location information to improve the network performance in terms of energy consumption, average network overhead and packet delivery ratio. In EDORQ, the void detection factor, residual energy and depth information of candidate nodes are jointly considered when defining the Q-value function, which contributes to proactively detecting void nodes in advance, meanwhile, reducing energy consumption. In addition, a simple and scalable void node recovery mode is proposed for the selection of candidate set so as to rescue packets that are stuck in void nodes unfortunately. Furthermore, we design a novel method to set the holding time for the schedule of packet forwarding base on Q-value so as to alleviate the packet collision and redundant transmission. We conduct extensive simulations to evaluate the performance of our proposed algorithm and compare it with other three routing algorithms on Aqua-sim platform (NS2). The results show that the proposed algorithm significantly improve the performance in terms of energy efficiency, packet delivery ratio and average network overhead without sacrificing too much average packet delay.
Keywords: Q-learning technique; depth-based routing; energy-efficient; opportunistic routing; underwater wireless sensor networks.