Depth-Based Energy-Balanced Hybrid Routing Protocol for Underwater WSNs

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are meant to be deployed at the areas that need to be monitored continuously without the human assistance. Therefore, these networks are expected to stay operational for a longer period of time. However, sensor nodes in these networks are equipped with limited energy (e.g., battery) resources. Moreover, uneven energy consumption is one of the biggest challenges in UWSN because it leads to creation of energy holes and ultimately shorten network lifetime. This invites UWSN designers to introduce protocols that can minimize and balance energy consumption of nodes. This paper presents DB-EBH, a Depth-Based Energy-Balanced Hybrid routing protocol for UWSNs. Like EBH, DB-EBH is a hybrid approach which is based on direct and multihop communication. However, DB-EBH considers linear random deployment of nodes. It selects a priority neighbor node for data forwarding on the basis of its depth from the sink. Simulation results validate the performance of DB-EBH in terms of energy efficiency, network lifetime and throughput.