Home // ICWMC 2014, The Tenth International Conference on Wireless and Mobile Communications // View article


Enhancing the Vector-Based Forwarding Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: A Clustering Approach

Authors:
Dina M. Ibrahim
Tarek E. Eltobely
Mahmoud M. Fahmy
Elsayed A. Sallam

Keywords: wireless networks; underwater sensor networks; multiple clusters; routing protocols

Abstract:
Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have an important role in different applications, such as offshore exploration and ocean monitoring. The networks consist of a considerably large number of sensor nodes deployed at different depths. Many routing protocols have been proposed in order to discover an efficient route between the sources and the sink. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to improve the performance of the Vector-Based Forwarding (VBF) protocol which we call a Clustering Vector-Based Forwarding algorithm (CVBF). In the proposed algorithm, the space volume of the network is divided into a number of clusters where one virtual sink is assigned to each cluster. Then, the nodes inside each cluster are allowed to communicate with themselves just to reach its virtual sink node, which in turn sends the packets to the main sink in the network. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm reduces the energy consumption especially in dense networks, increases the packet delivery ratio especially in sparse networks, and decreases the average end-to-end delay in both sparse and dense networks. These advantages are emphasized when the algorithm is compared with four other powerful routing algorithms: VBF, Hop-by-Hop VBF (HH-VBF), Vector-Based Void Avoidance (VBVA), and Energy-Saving VBF (ES-VBF) routing protocols.

Pages: 98 to 104

Copyright: Copyright (c) IARIA, 2014

Publication date: June 22, 2014

Published in: conference

ISSN: 2308-4219

ISBN: 978-1-61208-347-6

Location: Seville, Spain

Dates: from June 22, 2014 to June 26, 2014