EH-ARCUN: Energy Harvested Analytical Approach Towards Reliability with Cooperation for Underwater WSNs

Underwater sensor networks are ad hoc networks to monitor different underwater phenomenons such as pollution control, petrol mining, and observation of echo life. For underwater sensor networks to operate for longer duration of time, hoarding energy from background sources is viable option. One such source is harvesting energy from water currents using piezoelectric material embedded in sensor nodes. Piezoelectric materials can produce electricity when pressure is applied on it in the form of oscillating frequency produced by hydrophones. In this paper we have analyzed cooperation-based technique in underwater sensor networks containing sensor nodes which select relay nodes in their immediate vicinity with energy harvesting capabilities. These relay sensor nodes employ technique of amplify and forward (AF). As in current literature, all cooperative-based UWSN routing techniques are without integration of any type of energy harvesting schemes; considering this, we have incorporated piezoelectric energy harvesting mechanism into relay nodes in order to decrease end-to-end delay, increase stability period, and improve packet delivery ratio. As case study, we have selected cooperation-based UWSN protocol ARCUN (Analytical Approach towards Reliability with Cooperation for Underwater WSNs) and integrated piezoelectric energy harvesting scheme with it. We compared our new scheme EH (energy harvested)-ARCUN with ARCUN and RACE (Reliability and Adaptive Cooperation for Efficient Underwater Sensor Networks). Simulation results show improvement of EH-ARCUN over ARCUN and RACE schemes.