Energy Efficient Layered Cluster Head Rotation Based Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Energy efficiency is of paramount concern in underwater sensor networks. The very nature of underwater environment makes it difficult to deploy an energy efficient network that enhances network lifetime. The existing protocols of terrestrial networks cannot be implemented directly to underwater scenarios and as such new protocols have to be designed because of speed of signal propagation under water. Improving the energy efficiency in UWSNs is an active area of research and many protocols to that end have been proposed. The routing protocol that this paper proposes is Energy Efficient Layered Cluster Head Rotation (EE-LCHR) routing protocol. This protocol makes use of the multi sink architecture and creates virtual layers containing a number of sensor nodes such that the hop count from the sensor nodes in a particular layer to the surface sink is the same. Also each layer has a number of clusters with a cluster head that keeps on rotating depending on the fitness value of the sensor nodes. The proposed protocol as compared to other extant protocols like EE-DBR and DBR improves network lifetime. The presence of virtual layers and rotation of cluster heads together ensure that energy balance is better achieved in our proposed protocol which leads to an enhanced network lifetime.