The Effect of Routing Protocols on the Performance of Wireless Networks in Versatile Underwater Applications

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have attracted the research community due to their critical applications, such as environmental monitoring, hurricane tracking, and disaster analysis, to mention a few. This kind of network struggles with many challenges, such as propagation delay and limited energy resources. Many efforts in the literature try to overcome these challenges. However, there is still a need to perform more investigations aiming to obtain more reliable approaches for UWSNs. Therefore, this article suggests an Efficient Energy-Depth Hybrid Routing Protocol (EEDH-RP) that addresses the aforementioned issues. The proposed method integrates energy-efficie and depth-based routing strategies, aiming at optimizing packet delivery and minimizing consumption of powe. The proposed routing involves a hybrid forwarding metric in a way that assumes residual energy and depth information, as well as adaptive transmission power control to improve reliability.The proposed routing is assessed against three well-known routing protocols, namely Vector-Based Forwarding VBF, Depth-Based Routing DBR, and HydroCast Routing HCR. The evaluation involves metrics such as packet delivery ratio, energy consumption, end-to-end delay, network lifetime, and throughput. According to the results, EEDH-RP performed better than the benchmark. It gains 92% for packet delivery ratio, energy consumption of 450 joules (with improvements of 25%, 18%, and 10% for VBF, DBR, and HCR, respectively), and 1.2s for end-to-end delay. Our proposal also extends network lifetime by 28% compared to VBF, and 12% compared to DBR.