An environment-aware routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

A number of routing protocols have been proposed for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). However, most of their routing protocols do not take into account the environmental information like water depth since the shallow and deep water have different characteristics. In this article, we present an environment-aware routing protocol (named ERP) for UWSNs. ERP performs different routing operations according to the water depth in UWSNs. Using the NS-2 simulator, ERP is compared against a well-known routing protocol (i.e., DBR) and a localisation-free routing protocol (i.e., H2-DAB). Simulations results prove that ERP shows increased performance improvements over DBR and H2-DAB.