An Energy Efficient Interference and Route Aware Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks
Anwar Khan, Mohammad Hossein Anisi, Ihsan Ali, Nadeem Javaid, Muhammad Qaisar Azeem and Hasan Mahmood
Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have recently gained significant importance in exploring the aquatic environment. However, underwater communication carries a number of limitations and constraints such as long multipath delay, low bandwidth and limited battery life. These issues and challenges demand for research techniques and strategies to be overcome in an efficient and effective fashion. Energy efficient routing protocols design is one of the promising solutions for addressing these problems. Adapting the shortest path from source to destination with minimal interference can guarantee energy efficiency and improvement in other parameters as well. It also avoids interference that results in packet and information loss. In this paper, an energy efficient interference and route aware (EEIRA) protocol is designed for UWSNs. The protocol selects the best relay nodes to forward the sensed data of the submerged sensor nodes to the surface sink. Our work is unique in that it involves the selection of routing path with the least interference and the shortest distance from source to destination. Simulation results show that our scheme outperforms the counterpart techniques in terms of energy consumption, end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio.
Keywords: Energy efficiency, UWSNs, EEIRA, interference, shortest path, routing