Over the last decade a large number of routing protocols has been designed for achieving energy efficiency in data collecting wireless sensor networks. The drawbacks of using a static sink are well known. It has been argued in the literature that a mobile sink may improve the energy dissipation compared to a static one. Some authors focus on minimizing Emax, the maximum energy dissipation of any single node in the network, while others aim at minimizing Ebar, the average energy dissipation over all nodes. In our paper we take a more holistic view, considering both Emax and Ebar.

Due to the limited battery capacity of sensor nodes, a minimization of energy consumption is a potential research area in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). However, energy hole and coverage hole creations lead performance degradation of UWSNs in terms of network lifetime and throughput. In this paper, we address the energy hole creation issue in depth-based routing techniques, and devise a technique to overcome the deficiencies in existing techniques. Besides addressing the energy hole issue, the proposition of a coverage hole repair technique is also part of this paper. In areas of the dense deployment, sensing ranges of nodes redundantly overlap. Our proposed technique takes a benefit of redundant overlapping and repairs a coverage hole during network operation. Simulation results show that our two techniques cohesively conserve nodes' energy, which ultimately maximizes the network lifetime and throughput at the cost of increased delay.

Most applications of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) demand reliable data delivery over a longer period in an efficient and timely manner. However, the harsh and unpredictable underwater environment makes routing more challenging as compared to terrestrial WSNs. Most of the existing schemes deploy mobile sensors or a mobile sink (MS) to maximize data gathering. However, the relatively high deployment cost prevents their usage in most applications. Thus, this paper presents an autonomous underwater vehicle (AUV)-aided efficient data-gathering (AEDG) routing protocol for reliable data delivery in UWSNs. To prolong the network lifetime, AEDG employs an AUV for data collection from gateways and uses a shortest path tree (SPT) algorithm while associating sensor nodes with the gateways. The AEDG protocol also limits the number of associated nodes with the gateway nodes to minimize the network energy consumption and to prevent the gateways from overloading. Moreover, gateways are rotated with the passage of time to balance the energy consumption of the network. To prevent data loss, AEDG allows dynamic data collection at the AUV depending on the limited number of member nodes that are associated with each gateway. We also develop a sub-optimal elliptical trajectory of AUV by using a connected dominating set (CDS) to further facilitate network throughput maximization. The performance of the AEDG is validated via simulations, which demonstrate the effectiveness of AEDG in comparison to two existing UWSN routing protocols in terms of the selected performance metrics.

This paper presents two new energy balanced routing protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs); Efficient and Balanced Energy consumption Technique (EBET) and Enhanced EBET (EEBET). The first proposed protocol avoids direct transmission over long distance to save sufficient amount of energy consumed in the routing process. The second protocol overcomes the deficiencies in both Balanced Transmission Mechanism (BTM) and EBET techniques. EBET selects relay node on the basis of optimal distance threshold which leads to network lifetime prolongation. The initial energy of each sensor node is divided into energy levels for balanced energy consumption. Selection of high energy level node within transmission range avoids long distance direct data transmission. The EEBET incorporates depth threshold to minimize the number of hops between source node and sink while eradicating backward data transmissions. The EBET technique balances energy consumption within successive ring sectors, while, EEBET balances energy consumption of the entire network. In EEBET, optimum number of energy levels are also calculated to further enhance the network lifetime. Effectiveness of the proposed schemes is validated through simulations where these are compared with two existing routing protocols in terms of network lifetime, transmission loss, and throughput. The simulations are conducted under different network radii and varied number of nodes.