Development of energy-efficient routing protocols is a major concern in the design of underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) since UASN nodes are typically powered by batteries, which are difficult to replace or recharge in aquatic environments. This study proposes an optimal hop position-based energy-efficient routing protocol for UASNs. Initially, the authors present an analytical model to compute the total energy consumption in a multi-hop UASN for deep water scenario, taking into account dependence of usable bandwidth on transmission distance and propagation characteristics of underwater acoustic channel. They derive analytical solution for the optimal hop distance that minimises total energy consumption in the network. They then propose an energy-efficient routing protocol that relies on the computation of optimal hop distance. In their routing scheme, selection of forwarding nodes are based on their depth, residual energy and closeness to the computed optimal hop position corresponding to source node. Simulation results show that total energy consumption of the network gets reduced drastically, leading to improvement in network lifetime. Moreover, the proposed routing scheme makes use of courier nodes to handle coverage-hole problem. The efficient movement of courier nodes improves packet delivery ratio and network throughput.
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