Time-variant balanced routing strategy for underwater wireless sensor networks

In the past decade, researchers’ interest in Underwater Wireless Sensors Networks has rapidly increased. There are several challenges facing the lifetime of UWSNs due to the harsh characteristics of the underwater environment. Energy efficiency is one of the major challenges in UWSNs due to the limited battery budget of the sensor nodes. In this paper, we aim at tackling the energy sink-hole problem that especially hits nodes close to the sink when they run out of battery power before other sensors in the network. We prove that we can evenly distribute the transmission load among mobile sensor nodes by letting sensor nodes adjust their transmission ranges. In this paper, we suppose that sensor nodes may adjust their transmission power up to three levels. Consequently, we strive for deriving the optimal load weight for each possible transmission power level that leads to fair energy consumption among all underwater sensors while taking into account the underwater sensors mobility. Performance results show that energy sink-hole problem is overcame and hence the network lifetime is maximized.