Towards Efficient Sink Mobility in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

The unique characteristics of underwater environment such as long propagation delay, limited bandwidth, energy-constraint and non-uniform topology are big challenges in designing a routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). In this paper, a novel routing scheme is proposed through which two mobile sinks are used for efficient collection of sensed data packets. Moreover, a new metric “Mobile Sink Utility Ratio (MUR)” is also introduced that helps in measuring the usage of mobile sink in the collection of data packets. The proposed scheme is rigorously evaluated and compared with current state-of-the-art routing protocols. The simulation of the proposed scheme shows promising results in terms of throughput, network lifetime, packet drop ratio and MUR.

Keywords

• underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs)
• energy efficiency
• energy and performance aware routing
• mobile sink
• mobile sink utility ratio