UCNSR: Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks Clustered Routing Protocol Based on Core Node Set

In response to the instability of connections caused by node mobility and the difficulty of data transmission due to poor link quality in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs), this article proposes an efficient and reliable underwater routing protocol based on the core node set design, called the underwater core node set routing (UCNSR) protocol. The proposed protocol aims to solve the challenges of high end-to-end delay, high network energy consumption, and low data packet transmission rate by adopting the core node set method, thereby ensuring the robustness and reliability of information transmission. First, based on node depth and chance weight, the UCNSR protocol performs mixed clustering of UWSNs to select cluster heads with data aggregation and routing functions. Then, nodes with low transmission load among the cluster heads are chosen to form a core node set. Based on this core node set, a virtual shortest transmission path tree is constructed. The UCNSR is tested through simulation experiments using the ns-2 software platform. The results indicate that the proposed UCNSR protocol has the lowest energy consumption, reducing energy consumption by about 21% compared to the suboptimal metaheuristics-based clustering with a routing protocol for UWSN (MCR-UWSN) protocol. In terms of end-to-end delay, UCNSR performs best in large-scale networks, with a performance that is approximately 18% better than the suboptimal MCR-UWSN protocol. In terms of data transmission efficiency, the UCNSR protocol outperforms the MCR-UWSN, opportunistic routing in underwater acoustic networks fusing depth adjustment and adaptive forwarding (OR-DAAF), distributed underwater clustering scheme (DUCS), and depth-based routing (DBR) protocols significantly.