Energy Efficient Chain Based Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

To explore the vast ocean, internet of underwater things has become the most attractive area of research. Underwater Smart things are deployed to facilitate the discovery of unexplored regions of ocean. Unique characteristics of underwater wireless sensor networks pose many constraints in transmission of data packets and energy efficient routing is one of them. Motivated by the significance of less costly energy efficient routing protocol, we propose energy efficient chain based routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks (E-CBCCP). While keeping in view the complex features of underwater dynamics, dynamic network topology and node mobility, energy of the cluster heads (CHs), relay nodes (RNs) and cluster coordinators (CCOs) has been considered during the transmission of data and role of the CHs, CCOs and RNs is changed after some time duration to maintain the load on the nodes. Distance based communication is based on the location aware nodes and can be used in monitoring domains during steady state but in dynamic state, location free communication is required therefore RN communication is based on hop to hop. Confidence level of the sensor nodes is computed to select the optimal RN and to improve the reliability. New prototype has shown the improvement over CARP a routing protocol in terms of data packets transmission and energy. Simulations in MATLAB validate our methodology which has decreased the communication cost of sensor nodes and hence prolonged the network lifetime