EEDOR: An Energy Efficient Depth-Based Opportunistic Routing Protocol for UWSNs

In this paper, we present an Energy Efficient Depth-Based Opportunistic Routing protocol (EEDOR) that enhances the network lifetime of underwater wireless sensor networks. We implement EEDOR using an opportunistic routing approach, where a source node and its neighbors use wireless broadcast when exchanging their information to form the forwarding set. A novel holding time formula is used for each forwarding node based on its depth difference with the source and its priority in the forwarding set. We compare our proposed EEDOR protocol with the well-known DBR and EEDBR protocols. Our extensive simulation results show that our technique is energy efficient, reduces retransmissions and increases network stability. Our simulation results also show that EEDOR outperforms the EECOR and FLCOR protocols.