Depth based stable election routing protocol for heterogeneous internet of underwater things (IoUT) energy efficiency

Abstract

Internet of underwater things (IoUT) is a technology enabling underwater sensor nodes to communicate with the IoT networks to support various applications. Efficient energy utilization and network lifetime are the two main critical issues related to the IoUT. Both performance factors are related to how efficiently the routing protocol is tailored especially for heterogeneous IoUT. In this context, efficient routing protocols that consider underwater nodes (UNs) energy heterogeneity can adjust the energy imbalance, especially in heterogeneous IoUT scenarios. In IoUT, both the UN's energies and their depths can greatly affect the energy efficiency and clustering-based routing protocol. This paper provided an energy and depth-based stable election routing protocol (SEP) to suit the requirements of underwater communications. The objective of the depth-based SEP protocol is to enhance energy-efficient routing while considering the varying energy levels of UNs in IoUT. The proposed protocol depends on the depth-based cluster head (CH) election approach by defining distinct functions tailored for UNs with different energy levels and depths, in addition to the distance between the selected CH and the surface base station. Experimental results indicate that depth-based SEP-IoUT protocol outperforms network lifetime more than conventional SEP and SEP-IoUT. It gives an average stability period of 19.6 % in addition to reducing energy consumption by 39 % and 15.7 % when compared to SEP and SEP-IoUT respectively.