Abstract
Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is a technological revolution that could mark a new era for scientific, industrial, and military underwater applications. To mitigate the hostile underwater channel characteristics, this article considers a multimodal underwater network that hybridizes acoustic and optical wireless communications to achieve an ubiquitous control and high-speed low-latency networking performance, respectively. Since underwater optical wireless communications (UOWCs) suffer from limited range, it requires effective multihop routing solutions. In this regard, we propose a sector-based opportunistic routing (SectOR) protocol. Unlike the traditional unicast routing (TUR) techniques, which send packets to a unique relay, opportunistic routing (OR) targets a set of candidate relays by leveraging the broadcast nature of the UOWC channel. OR improves the packet delivery ratio as the likelihood of having at least one successful packet reception is much higher than that in TUR. Contingent upon the performance characterization of a single-hop link, we obtain a variety of local and global metrics to evaluate the fitness of a candidate set (CS) and develop candidate prioritization techniques for various OR metrics. Since rate \leftrightarrow error and range \leftrightarrow beamwidth tradeoffs yield different CS diversities, we develop a candidate filtering and searching algorithm to find the optimal sector shaped coverage region by scanning the feasible search space. Moreover, a hybrid acoustic/optic coordination mechanism is considered to avoid duplicate transmission of the relays. Numerical results show that the SectOR protocol can perform even better than optimal unicast routing protocols in well-connected underwater networks.