Energy Efficient Clustering Based Depth Coordination Routing Protocol For Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) have emerged as a promising technology for detecting physical attributes of water such as pressure, temperature, etc. However, the dynamic conditions of water depth, energy constraints, and delay are the main challenges in the design of energy-efficient routing protocols. Hence, there is a need for a forwarder set selection with depth coordination to reduce the energy constraints of UWSN. In this work, we presented an Energy-efficient Clustering Based Depth coordination routing protocol (E-CDBR) to minimize energy consumption with less delay for UWSN. Initially, the nodes are randomly deployed, and a surface sink is positioned at the top of the underwater network area. Then a clustering approach is used to determine the optimal number of clusters before CH selection in the cluster area. In the CH selection process, we employed two criteria to select the CH based on depth coordination and in-cluster position. Lastly, the selected CH transmits its data towards the surface sink when the cluster area is in the transmission range. Simulations are conducted to validate the performance in terms of selected parameters. Performance results show that the E-CDBR approach achieves lower energy consumption, higher network lifetime, and less delay than existing methods.