The use of underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) offers great advantages in many automatic observation services such as water monitoring (ocean, sea, etc.) and registering of geological events (landslides, earthquakes). However, UWSNs have many more limitations than terrestrial sensor networks (smaller bandwidth, higher delays, etc.) with new requirements such as low power consumption by nodes or being able to select appropriate routes in a dynamic topology due to water currents and movements. To cope with these problems, the use of a routing protocol is very important. In this paper we propose a routing technique that adapts to changes in the network topology, avoiding multiple retransmissions that would affect its overall performance. This protocol is energy-efficient and is implemented using a fuzzy analytical hierarchical process (FAHP) under multi-criteria decision making (MCDM) to make an intelligent routing decision based on objectives, criteria and alternatives. To select the next node on the route, several comparison matrices are used: number of hops, distances to the sink node, and number of neighbors. The results show that the proposed setup behaves similarly to other existing underwater sensor network routing schemes using fuzzy schemes such as SPRINT.
Keywords: UWSNs; fuzzy analytical hierarchy process; routing protocols.