A power-efficient routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks have attracted significant attention recently from both academia and industry to explore natural undersea resources and gathering of scientific data in aqueous environments. The nature of an underwater sensor network, such as low bandwidth and large propagation latency, floating node mobility, and power efficiency, is significantly different from traditional ground-based wireless sensor networks. Power-efficient communication protocols are thus urgently demanded in the deployment of underwater sensor networks. In this paper, a routing protocol is developed to tackle these problems in underwater wireless sensor networks. A forwarding node selector is employed to determine the appropriate sensors to forward the packets to the destination, and a forwarding tree trimming mechanism is adopted to prevent excess spread of forwarded packets. The proposed protocol is compared with a representative routing protocol for UWSNs in the literature. The experimental results verify the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed work.