Underwater Wireless Sensor Network's Performance Enhancement with Cooperative Routing and Sink Mobility

Abstract

Network efficiency and reliability in terms of high throughput, energy conservation, low bit error rate (BER) and reduced delay are pre-requisites for many applications in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs). However, distinctive features of UWSNs like low available bandwidth, large propagation delay, highly dynamic network topology, and high error probability pose many challenges for devising efficient and reliable communication protocols. In this paper, we therefore propose a protocol that focuses on enhancing network reliability and efficiency using cooperative routing and sink mobility. Many cooperative communication protocols have been developed which investigate the physical and MAC layer aspects to improve link efficiency in harsh underwater environment, however, at network layer, it is still unexplored. Similarly, cooperative routing is not yet collaborated with sink mobility. In this paper, Cooperative routing is implemented at network layer along with sink mobility. Potential relay and destination nodes for cooperative routing are selected on the basis of their depth as well as residual energy information. Data from source node is forwarded towards the destination node via relay nodes in a cooperative manner. Sink mobility further improves the results by directly gathering data from nodes. Based on the comprehensive simulations implemented in MATLAB, we observe that our scheme improves the performance in terms of network lifetime, energy efficiency and throughput along with reducing delay and BER.