Energy Efficient Routing for Underwater Sensor Network Using Eco-Aware Routing Protocol in Comparison with opportunistic Routing Protocol

Under Water Sensor Networks (UWSN) are promising technologies for oceanography, environmental monitoring, disaster prevention, and resource exploration applications; however, they do suffer from low bandwidth, high delay, and energy limitations. Since recharging or replacing sensor batteries is impractical, achieving longer network lifetimes and reliable data transmission relies on advanced routing protocols suited to underwater environments. In this work, two related routing protocols, Eco Aware Routing Protocol (EARP) and Opportunistic Routing Protocol (ORP), are compared in terms of their energy efficiency. EARP reduces energy consumption and maximizes network lifetime through residual energy-based node selection, where ORP exploits the stochastic nature of underwater communications by randomly choosing several candidate forwarders for packet relaying. The results indicate that EARP performs better compared to ORP with regard to energy consumption and PDR while taking an average time of less delay end-to-end. EARP's energy-aware algorithms adapt to changing conditions and prioritize only nodes with maximum residual energy, thereby optimizing data forwarding and preventing network partitioning. MATLAB- based simulations show that EARP would actually outperform the setup in most of the conditions with respect to node density. Actually, the simulation results obtained elucidate EARP's ability to mitigate key challenges of UWSNs, thus enhancing energy efficiency and packet delivery delay.