A Novel Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Network Using Pareto Uninformed and Heuristic Search Techniques

In underwater communication, establishing a communication link between the sensor in the sea bed and the surface sinks is a daunting task. Further, the data has to be transmitted with minimum delay and maximum reliability. Therefore, the present study proposes a biobjective routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks. The existing protocols are reviewed and it is found that the traditional depth based and vector-based routing protocols are not able to tackle these conflicting objectives and hence suffer transmission failures with high delay. A biobjective optimization of delay and reliability of routes is proposed to obtain pareto-optimal routes employing uninformed search technique and a modified greedy best first search heuristic. Through simulation experiments, it is found that the biobjective protocol performs better than depth based, delay based and reliability-based routing protocols. However, since the biobjective routing problem in underwater wireless sensor networks is known to be NP-hard and dynamic in nature, the computational effort of uninformed search in yielding the exact solutions increases as the network size increases. The modified greedy best first search heuristic is employed to yield sub-optimal routes with less computational effort without compromising on the quality of the solutions and hence suitable for larger networks.