Energy efficient routing for Mobile underwater wireless sensor networks

Similar to the terrestrial sensor networks, the design of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) has several challenges such as limited bandwidth, defective underwater channels and high propagation delay. Another primordial problem in UWSN is energy resource depletion of sensor node, which cannot be recharged; also solar energy cannot be exploited. In the coming years the number of sensor used in UWSN will be increased, thus our motivation of this study was to propose a routing algorithm for energy-constrained underwater system environments. In this paper two new clustering algorithms are proposed for Mobile underwater wireless sensor networks KEER and its enhanced version EKEER that aim to extend the network's lifetime. In both the algorithms, k-means clustering is used in the clustering phase. In the CH-selection step, the cluster head is elected initially based on the closeness to the center of the cluster, then the node having the higher residual energy elects itself as a cluster head in the next rounds. The extended version of KEER algorithm use a multihop transmission between the CHs and underwater sink and this brought significant improvement in terms of energy consumption. These algorithms are extensively simulated using random mobility model, with different speeds to evaluate their performance. Simulation results show that both KEER and EKEER are successful in achieving their goals.