Energy-balanced and depth-controlled routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

As the ocean exploration becomes more and more popular, the Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) has recently received extensively attentions. In UWSN, a large number of nodes are deployed at different depths, which means once deployed, it will be difficult to replace or recharge due to the complex underwater environment. Therefore, improving the lifetime of the UWSN network is one of critical issue to be studied. Since the sensor nodes are distributed at different depths, the energy of the nodes near to the horizontal plane which have more data to forward will be exhausted more quickly. The unbalanced energy consumption leads to a decline in network lifetime. To address this problem, we propose an Energy-Balanced and Depth-Controlled Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks in this paper. The proposed protocol replaces the low-energy nodes with the high-energy nodes by adjusting their depths to achieve balanced energy consumption among the whole network. Experimental results show our scheme effectively improves the lifetime of the whole network.