A depth-controlled and energy-efficient routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor network attracted massive attention from researchers. In underwater wireless sensor network, many sensor nodes are distributed at different depths in the sea. Due to its complex nature, updating their location or adding new devices is pretty challenging. Due to the constraints on energy storage of underwater wireless sensor network end devices and the complexity of repairing or recharging the device underwater, this is highly significant to strengthen the energy performance of underwater wireless sensor network. An imbalance in power consumption can cause poor performance and a limited network lifetime. To overcome these issues, we propose a depth controlled with energy-balanced routing protocol, which will be able to adjust the depth of lower energy nodes and be able to swap the lower energy nodes with higher energy nodes to ensure consistent energy utilization. The proposed energy-efficient routing protocol is based on an enhanced genetic algorithm and data fusion technique. In the proposed energy-efficient routing protocol, an existing genetic algorithm is enhanced by adding an encoding strategy, a crossover procedure, and an improved mutation operation that helps determine the nodes. The proposed model also utilized an enhanced back propagation neural network for data fusion operation, which is based on multi-hop system and also operates a highly optimized momentum technique, which helps to choose only optimum energy nodes and avoid duplicate selections that help to improve the overall energy and further reduce the quantity of data transmission. In the proposed energy-efficient routing protocol, an enhanced cluster head node is used to select a strategy that can analyze the remaining energy and directions of each participating node. In the simulation, the proposed model achieves 86.7% packet delivery ratio, 12.6% energy consumption, and 10.5% packet drop ratio over existing depth-based routing and energy-efficient depth-based routing methods for underwater wireless sensor network. © The Author(s) 2022.