QERP: Quality-of-Service (QoS) Aware Evolutionary Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Quality-of-service (QoS) aware reliable data delivery is a challenging issue in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). This is due to impairments of the acoustic transmission caused by excessive noise, extremely long propagation delays, high bit error rate, low bandwidth capacity, multipath effects, and interference. To address these challenges, meet the commonly used UWSN performance indicators, and overcome the inefficiencies of the existing clustering-based routing schemes, a novel QoS aware evolutionary cluster based routing protocol (QERP) has been proposed for UWSN-based applications. The proposed protocol improves packet delivery ratio, and reduces average end-to-end delay and overall network energy consumption. Our comparative performance evaluations demonstrate that QERP is successful in achieving low network delay, high packet delivery ratio, and low energy consumption.