Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks for Sea Border Security using Hexagonal Node Deployment Strategy and Inter-Sensor Region to Region Routing

Securing a nation’s sea borders through effective maritime surveillance is vital, as the infiltration of trespassers and terrorists poses a significant threat to national security and stability. To address this challenge, this work enhances sea border monitoring by mitigating the communication and energy constraints inherent in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) through a novel deployment and routing framework. Specifically, we propose a Hexagonal Node Deployment Strategy (HNDS) integrated with an Inter-Sensor Region-to-Region Routing (ISRRR) protocol. The hexagonal deployment ensures uniform and efficient spatial coverage of the surveillance area, while the ISRRR protocol enables energy-aware routing by selecting forwarding nodes based on their residual energy. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed ISRRR protocol achieves up to a 50% improvement in detection probability and routing efficiency compared to conventional distributed deployment and routing approaches. Key performance metrics, including end-to-end delay and time complexity, further validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework. To the best of our knowledge, this is among the first studies to integrate hexagonal spatial deployment with energy-conscious inter-region routing in UWSNs for maritime border security. The proposed integrated strategy significantly enhances surveillance coverage and communication reliability.