Intelligent Fuzzy-Based Adaptive Routing Protocol for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks in Marine Environmental Monitoring Applications

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have emerged as the critical infrastruc-ture systems for marine environmental monitoring purposes, which enabling the real-timedata collection from oceanic ecosystems in continuous manner. However, the unique charac-teristics that are presented by underwater acoustic communication environments present thesignicant challenges including the limited bandwidth availability, high energy consump-tion requirements, variable propagation delays, and dynamic network topology changes.This paper introduces an Intelligent Fuzzy-Based Adaptive Routing Protocol (IFARP) thatis specically designed for marine environmental monitoring applications. Our proposedapproach integrates the fuzzy logic decision-making mechanisms with adaptive routing al-gorithms to address the inherent uncertainties that exist in underwater communicationenvironments. The proposed protocol considers the multiple network parameters includingresidual energy levels, link quality indicators, distance metrics, and environmental stabilityfactors to make the optimal routing decisions. The extensive simulation results demonstratethat IFARP achieves the superior performance when compared to existing protocols, withimprovements of 15.7% in packet delivery ratio, 28.3% reduction in energy consumption, and22.4% extension in network lifetime. The protocol also exhibits the excellent adaptabilityto varying environmental conditions, maintaining the consistent performance under dier-ent current velocities and acoustic interference levels. Furthermore, the proposed solutionaddresses the digital transformation needs in underwater monitoring systems by providingintelligent decision-making capabilities that can adapt to dynamic marine environments.