A cross layered approach to improve energy efficiency of underwater wireless sensor network

Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) environments have some very specific characteristics which introduce many challenges. Due to lack of sunlight as well as harsh conditions of underwater environment it is very difficult to change batteries and maintain power supply in underwater sensor nodes while in terrestrial WSN, managing power is easy due to ease of changing batteries and even a node can be changed as it is not as costly as an underwater sensor node. Moreover, in terrestrial WSN, solar power can also be utilized. Also in UWSN, often the transmission range required is more compared to terrestrial WSN as UWSNs are very sparse, which also results in more power consumption. Thus our focus is to improve the energy efficiency of UWSN. One of the way to improve energy efficiency is using cross layered approach. We have proposed a cross layered approach, cross layered VBF (CL-VBF), in which the routing layer is able to carry out power management along with the MAC layer. We evaluate our proposed approach with respect to overall energy consumption, per node energy consumption, average per node energy consumption, total end-to-end delivery and packet-delivery ratio by varying number of nodes, transmission range and packet size. We find that the newly designed CL-VBF achieves higher efficiency in energy consumption compared to VBF but has a low packet delivery ratio.