Hop-based void avoidance routing protocol for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Abstract

More than 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. There is a need to explore the underwater in various applications like disaster detection, environmental monitoring, resource detection, etc. Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are the prominent technology used in exploring underwater. UASNs faces challenges such as energy constraint on networks, increased routing complexity due to dynamic network topology, and void node results in increased complexity. The void node poses a major challenge in the routing of UASNs. A void node not being handled properly leads to a lower packet delivery ratio (PDR), higher end-to-end delay. This paper proposes a hop-based void avoidance routing (HVAR) protocol, which is a sender-based, void-avoidance routing protocol. HVAR efficiently distributes void node information in the networks and avoids data transmission to such nodes in the network. HVAR is implemented using UnetStack, and its performance is compared with the state-of-the-art Interference-aware routing (Intar) in terms of end-to-end delay, PDR, energy consumption, and throughput. © © 2023 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.