Energy Balanced Localization-Free Cooperative Noise-Aware Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Owing to the harsh and unpredictable behavior of the sea channel, network protocols that combat the undesirable and challenging properties of the channel are of critical significance. Protocols addressing such challenges exist in literature. However, these protocols consume an excessive amount of energy due to redundant packets transmission or have computational complexity by being dependent on the geographical positions of nodes. To address these challenges, this article designs two protocols for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). The first protocol, depth and noise-aware routing (DNAR), incorporates the extent of link noise in combination with the depth of a node to decide the next information forwarding candidate. However, it sends data over a single link and is, therefore, vulnerable to the harshness of the channel. Therefore, routing in a cooperative fashion is added to it that makes another scheme called cooperative DNAR (Co-DNAR), which uses source-relay-destination triplets in information advancement. This reduces the probability of information corruption that would otherwise be sent over a single source-destination link. Simulations-backed results reveal the superior performance of the proposed schemes over some competitive schemes in consumed energy, packet advancement to destination, and network stability.