Towards Void Hole Alleviation: Enhanced GEographic and Opportunistic Routing Protocols in Harsh Underwater WSNs

Internet of Things enabled Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (IoT-UWSNs) are quite useful in monitoring different tasks including: from instrument monitoring to the climate recording and from pollution control to the prediction of natural disasters. However, there are some challenges, which affect the performance of a network, i.e., void hole occurrence, high Energy Consumption (EC) and low Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR). Therefore, in this work, two energy efficient routing protocols are proposed to maximize the PDR by minimizing the ratio of void hole occurrence. Scalability analysis of the proposed routing protocols is also performed. Additionally, feasible regions are computed to check the optimality of the proposed protocol in terms of EC. Furthermore, proposed protocols are compared with benchmark routing protocols in counterparts. Simulation results clearly show that proposed routing protocols achieved 80-81% higher PDR than GEographic and opportunistic routing with Depth Adjustment based topology control for communication Recovery (GEDAR) and Transmission Adjustment Neighbor-node Approaching Distinct Energy Efficient Mates (TA-NADEEM). Moreover, the ratio of void hole occurrence is minimized upto 30% approximately.