Abstract
Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) gained the attention of researchers due to their substantial applications in various fields. The major application areas of UWSN are environmental monitoring, underwater oil and gas extraction and military surveillance, smart farming, communication, and others. However, UWSNs are also prone to significant issues, such as limited network lifetime, the low processing capability of nodes, high energy consumption to run routing protocols, and difficult node replacement. Therefore, enhancing the lifetime of UWSN by reducing energy consumption and processing is a research issue. In this research, we proposed the IoT enabled depth base routing method (IDBR) to utilize energy efficiently. The performance of the proposed IDBR method is compared with conventional DBR protocol using simulation conducting in MATLAB. The performance of both the methods (i.e., IDBR and DBR) is evaluated in network energy consumption, the number of alive nodes, sink utilization, and end-to-end delay. The simulation-based experiment results show that IDBR consumes 27.7% less energy and increases network stability than the DBR. Similarly, the utilization of the surface sinks in IDBR is more as compared to DBR as in IDBR, and sinks work as relay forward data to the base station without processing which increases the power of field nodes. The proposed mechanism improves the network’s lifetime and increases the accessibility and security of the sensed data.