EH-DBR: Energy Harvesting Depth Based Routing for Underwater Sensor Networks

Abstract

Wireless sensor networks (WSNs) are network of physical small sensors which are interconnected through wireless links. WSNs are ubiquitous in diverse types of environment such as air interface and underwater acoustic communication. WSNs are responsible for collecting data, accomplishing appropriate operations on it and if required then relay it to the sink node. WSNs had many issues and challenges specifically in underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN). Secondly there is an issue of network life time as the sensor nodes have limited battery and it is challenging to replace it frequently specially in UWSN. An important challenge in the performance of the DBR is the energy constraint due to limited battery life time, which can cause the entire network to go down. In this paper, we propose an Energy Harvesting Depth Based Routing Protocol (EH-DBR) protocol. Our proposed protocol (EH-DBR) sensor node harvest and store power via external acoustic source in the form of packets. The key advantage of our protocol is that its lifetime will be extended indefinitely. Moreover, our routing protocol can take advantage of DBR architecture without introducing extra cost. We conduct extensive simulations. The results show that EH-DBR can achieve very high packet delivery ratios due to long time performance.