An Energy Efficient Adaptive Cooperative Routing Protocol for Underwater WSNs

Underwater environment has very unique characteristics. Reliable and efficient communication between sensor nodes is very challenging. Firstly, because radio waves can not work well in such environment, so we use acoustic communication. Secondly, acoustic communication is very slower than radio communication. Moreover environment is very dynamic, which changes topology of network. Due to these reasons data can not reach to destination timely or reliably. This creates need of a technique which can improve performance of network in terms of reliability and throughput. Cooperation between nodes is one of the major techniques which can greatly enhance reliability of a network at cost of more energy consumption. In this technique if data can not reach to destination in any condition then it is retransmitted from another node called cooperative node. This also improves throughput of network. In this paper we propose region based cooperation between sensor nodes. Simulation results show that technique better performs in terms of network lifetime and efficient energy consumption.