Energy-aware routing for delay-sensitive underwater wireless sensor networks

The energy reduction is a challenging problem in the applications of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). The embedded battery is difficult to be replaced and it has an upper bound on its lifetime. Multihop relay is a popular method to reduce energy consumption in data transmission. The energy minimum path from source to destination in the sensor networks can be obtained through the shortest path algorithm. However, because of the node mobility, the global path planning approach is not suitable for the routing in UWSNs. It calls for an energy-efficient routing protocol for the high dynamic UWSNs. In this paper, we propose the modified energy weight routing (MEWR) protocol to deal with the energy-efficient routing of delaysensitive UWSNs. MEWR is a low flooding routing protocol. It can tolerate the node mobility in UWSNs and achieve a low end-to-end packet delay. MEWR can provide lower energy consumption than the existing low delay routing protocols through the dynamic sending power adjustment. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of MEWR.