DNAR: Depth and noise aware routing for underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, the underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have been proposed for exploration of the underwater resources and to obtain information about the aquatic environment. The noise in UWSNs challenges the successful transmission of packets from a sender to a receiver. There are many protocols in literature that address noise reduction/avoidance during underwater communication. However, they require localization information of each sensor nodes that itself is a challenging issue. In this paper, the minimum channel noise is considered and the depth and noise aware routing (DNAR) protocol is proposed to send the packets reliably from a sender node to a surface sink. In the DNAR protocol, more energy is assigned to the sensor nodes that have depth level ≤ 150 m. Therefore, the sensor nodes that deployed are nearby to the sink node have more capability of transmission and will not die quickly. Also, the proposed protocol selects the forwarder candidate that have lowest depth and minimum channel noise at the receiver. As compared to some existing schemes, the proposed scheme requires no geographical information of the nodes for data routing. The DNAR protocol is validated by Matlab simulation and compared it with the DBR scheme. The simulation results show that the DNAR has better results in-terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), total energy consumption, and the network lifetime.