Avoiding Energy Holes in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks with Balanced Load Distribution

In this paper, we overcome the problem of energy holes in UWSNs while considering the unique characteristics of underwater communication. In proposed scheme we consider UWSNs where nodes are manually deployed according to the defined deployment pattern to satisfy our application requirements in terms of energy saving. We used mixed routing technique i.e. direct transmission and hop-by-hop transmission for energy balancing in continuous monitoring applications for UWSNs. Sensor nodes forward the total data traffic (generated plus received) periodically to the sink with calculated load weights using variable communication ranges. The transmission ranges for 1-hop, 2-hop and direct transmission to the sink are used for data transmission to achieve load balancing for balanced energy consumption of all sensor nodes in the network. We prove that our scheme outperforms the existing selected schemes in terms of network lifetime and energy conservation. We select an optimal result from the simulation results for different possible combinations of transmissions.