A Hexagon Tessellation Approach for the Transmission Energy Efficiency in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

The energy efficiency is a key design issue to improve the lifetime of the underwater sensor networks (UWSN) consisting of sensor nodes equipped with a small battery of limited energy resource. In this paper, we apply a hexagon tessellation with an ideal cell size to deploy the underwater sensor nodes for two-dimensional UWSN. Upon this setting, we propose an enhanced hybrid transmission method that forwards data packets in a mixed transmission way based on location dependent direct transmitting or uniform multi-hop forwarding. In order to select direct transmitting or uniform multi-hop forwarding, the proposed method applies the threshold annulus that is defined as the distance between the cluster head node and the base station (BS). Our simulation results show that the proposed method enhances the energy efficiency compared with the existing multi-hop forwarding methods and hybrid transmission methods