Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) comprise numerous underwater wireless sensor nodes dispersed in the marine environment, which find applicability in several areas like data collection, navigation, resource investigation, surveillance, and disaster prediction. Because of the usage of restricted battery capacity and the difficulty in replacing or charging the inbuilt batteries, energy efficiency becomes a challenging issue in the design of UWSN. Earlier studies reported that clustering and routing are considered effective ways of attaining energy efficacy in the UWSN. Clustering and routing processes can be treated as nondeterministic polynomial-time (NP) hard optimization problems, and they can be addressed by the use of metaheuristics. This study introduces an improved metaheuristics-based clustering with multihop routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks, named the IMCMR-UWSN technique. The major aim of the IMCMR-UWSN technique is to choose cluster heads (CHs) and optimal routes to a destination. The IMCMR-UWSN technique incorporates two major processes, namely the chaotic krill head algorithm (CKHA)-based clustering and self-adaptive glow worm swarm optimization algorithm (SA-GSO)-based multihop routing. The CKHA technique selects CHs and organizes clusters based on different parameters such as residual energy, intra-cluster distance, and inter-cluster distance. Similarly, the SA-GSO algorithm derives a fitness function involving four parameters, namely residual energy, delay, distance, and trust. Utilization of the IMCMR-UWSN technique helps to significantly boost the energy efficiency and lifetime of the UWSN. To ensure the improved performance of the IMCMR-UWSN technique, a series of simulations were carried out, and the comparative results reported the supremacy of the IMCMR-UWSN technique in terms of different measures.
Keywords: communication; energy efficiency; metaheuristics; network lifetime; routing; underwater sensor networks.