Dolphin Swarm Inspired Protocol (DSIP) for Routing in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater communication is still carried out using communication cables because of the minimum development that is established in underwater wireless communications. The utilization of wires to make sure the connectivity of sensor nodes that are located at the bottom of the sea is highly expensive. Finding the best route to send the sensed data to the destination in minimum duration has become a primary challenge in underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN). Feasible routing protocols available for general sensor networks are not feasible for UWSN because of the difficult communication medium. Existing routing protocol face the problem of consuming more energy to deliver the data packet and also due to selecting the unfit route it faces more delay. To overcome the routing challenges present in UWSN, Dolphin Swarm Inspired Protocol (DSIP) is proposed in this paper. DSIP is inspired by the swarming nature of dolphins towards finding their food. Four significant phases involved in DSIP to find the best route in UWSN are searching, calling, reception, and predation. NS3 is used to evaluate the performance of DSIP against previous routing protocols with benchmark metrics namely packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, node death rate, and energy consumption. Results indicate that DSIP has consumed 1.43 times less energy than other previous protocols.