Cooperative routing for energy efficient underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) serve as a proficient source to monitor aquatic environment. However, data communications and information routing within these systems offer many challenges. To ensure sufficient network lifetime, energy efficiency in routing protocols serves as a major concern in UWSNs. This paper presents an energy competent cooperative routing scheme known as Region Based Courier-nodes Mobility with Incremental Cooperative (RBCMIC) routing. The proposed scheme uses broadcast nature of wireless nodes and performs an incremental cooperative routing. A rigorous evaluation and verification of the proposed scheme with current state-of-the-art yield improved energy efficiency, resulting in extended network lifetime. The results show that an overall improvement of 20% is witnessed in energy usage, whereas a notable 89% improvement is achieved in end-to-end delay in comparison to DEADS protocol.