EEDBR: Energy-Efficient Depth-Based Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Recently, Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have attracted much research attention from both academia and industry, in order to explore the vast underwater environment. However, designing network protocols is challenging in UWSNs since UWSNs have peculiar characteristics of large propagation delay, high error rate, low bandwidth and limited energy. In UWSNs, improving the energy efficiency is one of the most important issues since the replacement of the batteries of such nodes is very expensive due to harsh underwater environment. Hence, in this paper, we propose an energy efficient routing protocol, named EEDBR (Energy-Efficient Depth Based Routing protocol) for UWSNs. Our proposed protocol utilizes the depth of the sensor nodes for forwarding the data packets. Furthermore, the residual energy of the sensor nodes is also taken into account in order to improve the network life-time. Based on the comprehensive simulation using NS2, we observe that our proposed routing protocol contributes to the performance improvements in terms of the network lifetime, energy consumption and end-to-end delay.