Dynamic Neighbor Adaptation-Based Energy-Efficient Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) consist of sensor nodes deployed underwater to monitor and collect data on aquatic environments, essential for applications like military surveillance, environmental monitoring, and oil & gas exploration. This research tackles the challenge of energy-efficient communication in UWSNs, which face issues such as limited bandwidth, high signal attenuation and propagation delays due to water currents and temperature variations. The existing Neighboring-Based Energy-Efficient Routing (NBEER) protocol, while useful, overlooks these environmental factors, resulted to inefficient energy use and reduced network performance. To address this, a Dynamic Neighbor Adaptation (DNA) scheme was developed and integrated into NBEER, allowing the protocol to dynamically select Neighbor Head Nodes (NHNs) based on real-time network conditions and environmental factors. This adaptation improves load balancing and network stability. Simulated using MATLAB R2023b, the improved DNA-EERP protocol achieved a reduced end-to-end delay of 47.55s, lower total energy consumption of 9.16J, a higher packet delivery ratio of 83.95%, increased the number of alive nodes to 232, and improved the number of packets received to 26,050. These results demonstrate significant improvements in network stability, energy efficiency, and overall performance.