HYRMA: A hybrid routing protocol for monitoring of marine environments

The rapid development if society has generated an increasing number of human activities that have gradually modified the marine environement. Wirless sensor networks have been considered as potentially promising alternative for monitoring marine environment. Usually the topology of the monitoring system is formed by a group of fixed buoys that gather data, and a coordinator node is responsible to sent the data to a processing center. This topology does not demand a routing protocol. However some situations as the monitoring of the behavior of currents demands mobility of the buoys and as a consequence a more complex communication mechanism in order to send the information to the processing center. This paper presents HYRMA, a cluster-based hybrid routing protocol focused on the reduction of energy consumption which is applied in a marine environmental. Based on the results obtained from simulator, HYRMA is shown to be a suitable mechanism for data transmissions in a WSN applied in a marine environment.