An Efficient Hybrid Routing Protocol in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) is a kind of sensor networks that their operational fields have been developed under water in recent decades, although these networks deal with lots of challenges due to lack of the GPS1. These networks encounter researchers with many challenges by some limitations like high propagation delay, low bandwidth, high bit error rate, movement, limited battery and memory. In comparison with terrestrial sensor networks, sensors in the UWSN consume energy more because they use acoustic technology to communicate. Motivation of this research is proposing a routing protocol for underwater systematic settings with a limited energy. The settled sensor nodes in underwater cannot communicate directly with nodes near surface, so they need prepared multi hop communications with a proper routing plan. In wireless sensor networks, node clustering is a common way to organize data traffic and to decrease intra-network communications along with scalability and load balance improvement plus reducing of overall energy consumption of system. Therefore, in this article a fuzzy clustering routing protocol with data aggregation and balanced energy consumption for UWSNs is proposed. Simulation results show that in the proposed protocol, energy consumption becomes more uniformly distributed in the network and average of the node's energy usage and number of routing packets decreases and finally, packet delivery ratio and throughput are improved in the network in comparison with DABC3 and IDACB4 algorithms.