EH-IRSP: Energy Harvesting Based Intelligent Relay Selection Protocol

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are deployed to monitor various phenomena in marine environment such as pollution control, fuel exploration and underwater seismic activities. Various challenges such as, limited and non-replaceable batteries in sensor nodes, high path loss and high propagation delay exist for UWSNs, to name a few. Successful design deployment of an energy efficient routing scheme is an intense need of the day for successful operation of UWSNs. In this paper we have presented an energy efficient routing protocol by the name of Energy Harvesting Intelligent Relay Selection Protocol (EH-IRSP). The scheme uses task-specific energy harvested relay nodes using piezoelectric technique utilizing dynamic transmission radius incorporated in all sensor nodes. EH-IRSP protocol is compared with existing UWSNs protocols Cooperative UWSN (Co-UWSN) and Energy Harvested Analytical approach towards Reliability with Cooperation for Underwater WSNs (EH-ARCUN). The Co-UWSN focuses on strengthening the sound-to-noise ratio on the minimum distance communication channel in order to reduce the path loss. The EH-ARCUN scheme selects relay nodes based on energy harvesting level in combination with Amplify and Forward (AF) technique. The proposed scheme employs a Euclidean distance between the source-destination and source-relay nodes pairs. Each source node selects the most feasible energy harvested relay node by computing cosine of the angles between itself, relay node, and destination nodes and sends the data using cooperative communication. Based on these computed parameters, each source node adjusts its transmission radius hence conserving energy. Performance parameters for this comparison are based on stability period, packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay and path loss. Simulation results show enhanced performance of proposed scheme EH-IRSP in contrast to Co-UWSN and EH-ARCUN.