Underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) is an
emerging technology that has been used for different applications
such as warning systems for disasters, monitoring the ecosystem,
drilling of the oil, defense surveillance. Although underwater
communication may be accomplished using electromagnetic or
optical waves, but these methods are not feasible for practical
UWSN, due to signal attenuation. UWSN faces several issues like
restricted bandwidth, irregular node mobility, increased delay etc.
which affects the routing behavior. In this paper, an optimal delay
and lifetime aware depth based routing (ODLDR) protocol is
proposed. Protocol first introduced the group partitioning
algorithm for cluster formation that minimizes the energy
consumption of network then an efficient priority based
scheduling algorithm is proposed for trust computation, which
helps in finalizing the CH and routing path. The ODLDR protocol
is tested with the high density nodes in Network Simulator (NS2)
tool. The simulation results shows the effectiveness of the ODLDR
protocol in terms of energy consumption, packet delivery ratio,
positioning accuracy, end-to-end delay, throughput and network
lifetime.