Improved Interference Aware EEDBR Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Recently, Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) gained much attention of researcher due to its usefulness. Unlike terrestrial sensor networks, radio waves are not suitable for UWSNs due to harsh underwater environment. However, acoustic signals gained advantage over the radio waves for underwater communication. UWSNs have distinct characteristics i.e., high propagation delay, low frequency, high bit error rate and limited energy. Therefore, designing an efficient routing protocol for underwater sensor networks is quiet challenging. The major constraint of UWSNs is the limited battery of the sensor nodes. The replacement or recharging of batteries is a hectic job due to harsh underwater environment. Therefore we propose an energy efficient routing protocol, iIA-EEDBR, for UWSNs. iIA-EEDBR selects a forwarding node which has least depth, high residual energy and least number of neighbors. iIA-EEDBR improves the network lifetime by introducing sleep nodes in the UWSNs. When a node dies in the network, a sleep node takes over the performance of that particular dead node to avoid creation of routing holes. Due to the creation of the routing holes the network performances is affected and degraded. Therefore, iIA-EEDBR prevents the creation of routing holes.