An energy efficient routing algorithm in wireless underground sensor networks

There have been various researches regarding routing in wireless sensor networks for many years, but underground wireless communication in complex environments like soil-air or water-air is a new and tough problem for researchers. Replacement of the battery of sensor nodes is already a challenging task under normal conditions. However, the difficulty increases significantly when deploying them in environments like cultivation soils; therefore maintaining the network lifetime as well as the total number of living nodes in such an adverse setting is a challenging task for researchers. In this paper, we propose a new energy-efficient routing model in wireless underground sensor networks (WUSN) that considers the path loss energy of the energy model and the energy efficiency of the total network. The proposed FCM-WUSN model is compared against the well-known fuzzy routing method namely FCM in terms of network lifetime, energy consumption, total node alive, and underground node alive. It has been observed that the network lifetime of the proposed method is 1.5 × longer than that of the FCM, and the number of alive nodes including the underground nodes are 1.6 × higher than that of the FCM. The results are better even when running data sets with more sensors in the network and sensor positioning based on the depth of sensors deployed underground.