Clustering-based energy-efficient routing approach for underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

In underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), although energy dissipation in transmission mainly depends on employed routing algorithms and media access control (MAC) schemes, given the nature and challenges of the acoustic communication in water, all the layers of the protocol stack play an important role on achieving a high energy efficiency. Therefore, novel approaches that handle energy inefficiencies and extend the lifetime of UWSNs are required. In this paper, an event-driven energy-efficient routing approach called clustering-based energy-efficient routing (CBEER) is proposed to prolong the lifetime of UWSNs and its performance is evaluated through extensive simulations. Based on a novel clustering-based scheme, the proposed approach can find shortest routing paths to carry data packets and is able to realise uniform network energy consumption profile in the entire UWSN. The simulation-based evaluation studies reveal that CBEER performs well in terms of packet delivery ratio and overall network energy consumption.