Abstract
Energy-efficient and reliable underwater acoustic communication attracts a lot of research due to special marine communication conditions with limited resources in underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs). In their final analysis, the existing studies focus on controlling redundant communication and route void that greatly influence UASNs' comprehensive performances. Most of them consider directional or omnidirectional transmission for partial optimization aspects, which still have many extra data loads and performance losses. This paper analyzes the main issue sources causing redundant communication in UASNs, and proposes a lightweight differentiated transmission to suppress extra communication to the greatest extent as well as balance energy consumption. First, the layered model employs layer ID to limit the scale of the data packet header, which does not need depth or location information. Second, the layered model, fuzzy-based model, random modeling and directional-omnidirectional differentiated transmission mode comb out the forwarders step by step to decrease needless duplicated forwarding. Third, forwarders are decided by local computation in nodes, which avoids exchanging controlling information among nodes. Simulation results show that our method can efficiently reduce the network load and improve the performance in terms of energy consumption balance, network lifetime, data conflict and network congestion, and data packet delivery ratio.