EBH-DBR: energy-balanced hybrid depth-based routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, applications of underwater wireless sensor networks like environment monitoring, underwater life imaging, tactical surveillance, ocean floor monitoring demand a persistent network period. However, underwater wireless sensor networks face many design challenges like unreliable link, high packet drop rate, inadequate bandwidth, restricted battery power, high attenuation, etc. Therefore, to prolong the network lifespan, energy efficient as well as energy balanced both types of approach is equally demanded. An energy-balanced hybrid transmission approach is proposed in this article, which uses depth information in place of location to transmit data packets. It uses some parameters like depth of the sensor nodes, residual energy of the node, and reliability of the link to select the relay node to forward data packets. In the proposal network divided into the slices of the same width, to control the hop-count as well as to balance the energy consumption of the sensor nodes participating in data transmission, and also prolonging the network lifespan. The effectiveness of the proposal is validated through extensive simulation and results show that the EBH-DBR outperforms its counterpart techniques in terms of network lifespan, energy consumption, throughput, and transmission loss.