Enhance the Lifespan of Underwater Sensor Network Through Energy Efficient Hybrid Data Communication Scheme

The work in this proposal suggests an energy balanced, depth aware data transmission approach to prolonging the network lifetime of Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). As single-hop transmission is energy harvesting. Therefore, more often multi-hop communication paradigm is used to forward data towards the surface sink. However, multi-hop communication leads imbalanced consumption. Due to the fact that, nodes nearer to the surface may deplete more energy comparison to other nodes, this paper proposed a hybrid or mixed-hop transmission approach for balancing the energy consumption throughout the network. The selection of the relay node in mixed-hop transmission is based on optimal depth threshold and residual energy grades of the participating sensor nodes. This proposal uses energy of the nodes more efficiently thru balancing the energy consumption during data transmission as compared to other works proposed in the literature. The effectiveness of the proposal is evaluated and validated through simulation in terms of network lifetime, residual energy grades, and network throughput.