Clustering depth based routing for underwater wireless sensor networks

Large propagation delay, high error rate, low bandwidth and limited energy in Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) attract the attention of most researchers. In UWSNs, efficient utilization of energy is one of the major issue, as the replacement of energy sources in such environment is very expensive. In this paper, we have proposed a Cluster Depth Based Routing (cDBR) that is based on existing Depth Based Routing (DBR) protocol. In DBR, routing is based on the depth of the sensor nodes: the nodes having less depth are used as a forward nodes and consumes more energy as compared to the rest of nodes. As a result, nodes nearer to sink dies first because of more load. In cDBR, cluster based approach is used. In order to minimize the energy consumption, load among all the nodes are distributed equally. The energy consumption of each node is equally utilized as each node has equal probability to be selected as a Cluster Head (CH). This improves the stability period of network from DBR. In cDBR Cluster Heads (CHs) are used for forwarding packets that maximizes throughput of the network. We have compared our results with DBR and Energy Efficient DBR (EEDBR). The simulation result validates that cDBR achieves better stability period and high throughput comparatively to DBR and EEDBR.