SEEC: Sparsity-Aware Energy Efficient Clustering Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Many routing protocols are proposed regarding energy efficiency in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). We propose sparsity-aware energy efficient clustering (SEEC) protocol for UWSNs. SEEC specially search sparse regions of the network. We divide the network region into subregions of equal size and search sparse and dense regions of the network field with the help of sparsity search algorithm (SSA) and density search algorithm (DSA). SEEC improves network lifetime through sink mobility in sparse regions and clustering in dense regions of the network. SEEC also achieves network stability with optimal number of clusters formation in dense regions of the network where each dense region logically represents a static cluster. The division of the network region into subregions control routing hole problem in the UWSNs. SEEC minimizes network energy consumption with balanced scheme operations. Effectiveness of our proposed protocol is verified by simulation results.