Proposing an Energy optimized routing protocol for UWASN based on clustering

The Importance of Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) is increasing day by day. UWSN covers a vast area of application such as disaster prevention, assisted navigation, environmental monitoring or undersea explorations. UWSN consumes excessive amount of energy due to the use of acoustic waves to communicate which have some limitations such as limited bandwidth, high propagation delay, high bit error rate and more. Therefore energy consumption is the major concern at the time of designing a protocol for UWSN. Clustering mechanisms are commonly used in UWSN to design a balanced network that consumes less energy. In this paper we proposed an energy-efficient routing protocol for underwater 3D environments based on clustering. In this protocol, some of the nodes make a cluster where one node becomes cluster head and others are members of the cluster. A node becomes cluster head probabilistically based on the residual energy of the node. The simulation demonstrates that our proposed work uses less energy compared to the LEACH.