Energy efficient local area source routing protocol of underwater sensor networks in the deep ocean

Underwater sensor networks (IJWSN) usually face difficulties with battery draining. In the underwater environments, no available recharging system can cause severe degradation of performance in sensor network systems. In this paper, we propose an energy-efficient routing path by using Local Area Source Routing protocol. First of all, we derive relationship between energy consumption and environmental variables from underwater environmental properties to exploit this relationship as a link metric. Proposed Local Area Source Routing protocol enables UWSNs to reduce network traffic, since it does not need to send periodic packets to the whole network for routing advertisement and link status sensing. Each node shares only information of its neighboring nodes and finds a minimum cost path up to a sub-destination which sets the direction toward a designated final destination. Then, by applying Local Area Source Routing protocol repeatedly from a source to a sub-destination, a complete path can be established. Simulation results show that our proposed solution can achieve the best energy efficiency among 3-dimensional on-demand routing protocols.