A Novel Clustering Protocol for Network Lifetime Maximization in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is a pervasive technology with different characteristics and requirements, where energy conservation is a stringent requirement. Improving the network lifetime can have tremendous practical utility in these networks. The energy of the nodes in the network can be conserved by devising an efficient cluster head selection mechanism. This paper presents a novel energy-efficient clustering protocol (EECP) for the UWSN. The proposed protocol segregates the network based on horizontal clustering. In every iteration, the cluster heads are selected based on the energy level of the nodes. The performance of the proposed protocol is measured in terms of energy efficiency and network lifetime. Moreover, the performance of the EECP is further improved by adding nearest neighbor criteria for selecting the cluster head. This protocol is named as energy-efficient clustering protocol with nearest neighbor (EECP-NN). The efficacy of the proposed protocols is evaluated by comparing their performance with some of the state-of-the-art cluster-based protocols in this study.