A Clustered Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks are efficient tools to explore the ocean. In this paper, we study the node clustering problem in Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) and formulate the problem into a cluster-based optimization problem with an objective to balance the energy consumption and prolong the lifetime of the network. For this purpose, this paper presents a clustered routing protocol, which applies K-means algorithm to the network clustering to avoid the uneven clustering happened in LEACH. Considering the depth of nodes and the density around, the initial centers of clusters is selected by the maximum distance method. The prior cluster heads and the aided cluster heads are chosen with the consideration of the residual energy of nodes, the distance between nodes and the cluster center, and the distance between nodes and the base station to share the energy consumption. The network simulation results show that, compared with LEACH and LEACH-L, the algorithm can effectively balance the energy consumption, prolong the network lifetime, and increase the amount of data transmission.