Horizontal trajectory based mobile multi-sink routing in underwater sensor networks

Abstract

Scientific, commercial, exploration, and monitoring applications of underwater sensor networks have drawn the attention of researchers toward the investigation of routing protocols that are robust, scalable, and energy efficient. This has brought significant research in network layer routing protocols. Irrespective of the field of application it is desirable to increase network lifetime by reducing energy consumed by sensor nodes in the network or by balancing energy in the entire network. Energy balancing refers to the uniform distribution of the network’s residual energy such that all nodes remain alive for a long time. It requires uniform energy consumption by each sensor node in the network instead of the same node being involved in every transmission. In this paper, we discuss two routing methods for three-dimensional environments in which the water region under monitor is divided into subregions of equal height and each subregion has a sink. Nodes in the subregion send data to the sink designated for that subregion. The first method called static multi-sink routing uses static sinks and the second method called horizontal trajectory-based mobile multi-sink routing (HT-MMR) uses mobile sinks with a horizontal trajectory. Simulation results show that the proposed HT-MMR reduces average energy consumption and average energy tax by 16.69% and 16.44% respectively. HT-MMR is energy efficient as it enhances network lifetime by 11.11%.