Fair energy management with void hole avoidance in intelligent heterogeneous underwater WSNs

Due to the detrimental nature of aquatic environment, the design of routing protocols for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) faces numerous challenges, such as an optimal route selection, energy efficiency, propagation delay, etc. However, the energy efficiency is considered a key parameter while designing a routing strategy for UWSNs. Therefore, the dissipation of energy needs to be efficient for the prolongation of the network lifespan. For efficient battery consumption of a node, redundant data transmissions and communication over long distances are desired to be controlled because data transmissions over long distances causes an uneven dissipation of energy resulting in void hole creation. Due to the void hole creation, the node can not forward its data towards the destination because of the unavailability of relay node(s). In order to avoid the creation of void holes, we propose a routing mechanism which detects a void hole prior to its occurrence and takes an alternative route for successful data delivery. We compute an optimal number of forwarders at each hop as back up potential forwarders nodes to reduce the probability of data loss because of void hole occurrence. In addition, forwarding communication range is logically divided in to sub-forwarding areas in order to suppress the number of duplicate transmissions. We perform simulations to show that our claims are well grounded. The results depict that the proposed work has outperformed the compared baseline schemes (WDFAD-DBR and VHGOR) in terms of packet delivery ratio (PDR), total energy tax, end to end delay and number of redundant packets.