AAEERP: Advanced AUV-Aided Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Underwater WSNs

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are getting growing interest because of wide-range of applications. Most applications of these networks demand reliable data delivery over longer period in an efficient and timely manner. However, resource-constrained nature of these networks makes routing in a harsh and unpredictable underwater environment challenging. Most existing schemes either employ static or mobile sink for data collection. However, in former sensors near the sink deplete out their energy more quickly which limits network lifetime. Mobile sink based schemes are not suitable for delay-sensitive large-scale applications. Unlike prior work, this paper presents a novel Advanced AUV-aided Energy Efficient Routing Protocol (AAEERP) for reliable data delivery. To prolong network lifetime, AAEERP employs an autonomous underwater vehicle to collect data from gateways. To minimize energy consumption, we use a shortest path tree algorithm while associating sensor nodes with the gateways and devise a criterion to limit the association count of nodes. Moreover, the role of gateways is rotated to balance the energy consumption. To prevent data loss, AAEERP allows dynamic data collection time to AUV depending up the count of member sensors for each gateway. The performance of the AAEERP is validated through simulations. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of AAEERP in terms of various performance metrics.