An Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Underwater WSNs

A routing protocol, which is not expensive in packets forwarding and energy consumption, is fundamental for sensory data gathering and transmitting in underwater wireless sensor networks. To solve this issue, this paper proposes E-CARP, which is an enhanced version of the Channel-Aware Routing Protocol (CARP), to achieve the location-free and greedy hop-by-hop packet forwarding strategy. Generally, CARP does not consider the reusability of previously collected sensory data to support certain domain applications in the following, which induces data packets forwarding which may not be beneficial to applications. Besides, the PING-PONG strategy in CARP could be simplified for selecting the most appropriate relay node at each time point, when the network topology is relatively steady. These two research problems have been addressed by our E-CARP.