Void Hole Avoidance for Reliable Data Delivery in IoT Enabled Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to the limited availability of battery power of the acoustic node, an efficient utilization is desired. Additionally, the aquatic environment is harsh; therefore, the battery cannot be replaced, which leaves the network prone to sudden failures. Thus, an efficient node battery dissipation is required to prolong the network lifespan and optimize the available resources. In this paper, we propose four schemes: Adaptive transmission range in WDFAD-Depth-Based Routing (DBR) (A-DBR), Cluster-based WDFAD-DBR (C-DBR), Backward transmission-based WDFAD-DBR (B-DBR) and Collision Avoidance-based WDFAD-DBR (CA-DBR) for Internet of Things-enabled Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (IoT, UWSNs). A-DBR adaptively adjusts its transmission range to avoid the void node for forwarding data packets at the sink, while C-DBR minimizes end-to-end delay along with energy consumption by making small clusters of nodes gather data. In continuous transmission range adjustment, energy consumption increases exponentially; thus, in B-DBR, a fall back recovery mechanism is used to find an alternative route to deliver the data packet at the destination node with minimal energy dissipation; whereas, CA-DBR uses a fall back mechanism along with the selection of the potential node that has the minimum number of neighbors to minimize collision on the acoustic channel. Simulation results show that our schemes outperform the baseline solution in terms of average packet delivery ratio, energy tax, end-to-end delay and accumulated propagation distance.