Region Aware Proactive Routing Approaches Exploiting Energy Efficient Paths for Void Hole Avoidance in Underwater WSNs

Nowadays, constrained battery life expectancy is an important issue for reliable data delivery in an Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN). Conventional transmission methodologies increase the transmission overhead, i.e., the collision of packets, which influence the data transmission. Replacement of the sensors’ battery in brutal underwater environment is a difficult task. Therefore, to maintain a strategic distance from the unexpected failure of the network and to increase the life expectancy of the network, energy efficient routing protocols are required. At this end, in this paper, a proactive routing protocol with three different network types is proposed to solve the aforementioned issues. The proposed protocol adaptively changes its communication strategy depending on the type of the network, i.e., dense network, partially dense network and sparse network. This adaptive strategy helps the routing protocols to continue their transmission by avoiding the void holes. In the proposed protocol named Proactive routing Approach with energy efficient Path Selection (PA-EPS-Case I), vertical inter-transmission layering concept is introduced (using shortest and fastest path) in the dense and partially dense region. In addition, cluster formation concept is also appended to make transmission successful in the sparse regions. The Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR) is improved by the proposed protocol with minimum End to End (E2E) delay and packet drop ratio. Scalability of the proposed routing protocols is also analyzed by varying the number of nodes from 100-500. A comparative analysis is performed with two cutting edge routing protocols namely: Weighting Depth and Forwarding Area Division Depth Based Routing (WDFAD-DBR) and Cluster-based WDFAD-DBR (C-DBR). Simulation results demonstrate that proposed protocol achieved 12.64% higher PDR with 20% decrease in E2E delay than C-DBR-DBR. Furthermore, the proposed routing protocol outperformed C-DBR in terms of packet drop ratio up to 14.29% with an increase of EC up to 30%.