Multiple Mobile Sink Architecture Based Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

For the energy resource constrained Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs), designing a routing protocol needs to consider an effective approach that is able to make an intelligent utilization of energy thereby prolonging network life time. For prolonged network life time, energy consumption as well as load balancing are important. Incorporation of sink mobility into sensor networks can deal with this issue for it not only preserves energy of the nodes but also balances the energy consumption among the nodes. In this paper, a novel protocol called multiple mobile sink architecture based energy efficient routing protocol (MSEERP) for UWSNs is proposed. Multiple mobile sinks are employed to collect the data directly from sensor nodes and address the problem of communication void as well. The effectiveness of the proposed technique is assessed by extensive simulations and the results obtained are compared with the existing routing protocol named GEDAR. It is inferred from the simulation results that it outperforms in terms of packet delivery ratio, energy consumption and network life time.