An Underwater Routing Protocol with Void Detection and Bypassing Capability

The development of routing protocols for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) faces with different challenges, the most notable of which is perhaps how to deal with a void communication area. Over the past few years, some underwater protocols equipped with the void-handling techniques have been proposed to address this issue. The majority of them; however, are unable to detect and bypass the trapped nodes which can also lead a packet to become stuck in a void node. In this paper, we propose a new stateless routing protocol, called Energy-efficient and Void Avoidance Depth Based Routing (EVA-DBR) protocol which uses different control packets to detect the void and trapped nodes locally in the different area of network topology and then to exclude them from the routing paths using a passive participation approach. To the best of our knowledge, EVA-DBR is the first fully stateless routing protocol which can locally detect and bypass the trapped nodes in addition to the void nodes in UWSNs. The updating phase for sending the control packets is performed with the least possible cost, by eliminating the need for ACK packets. As an opportunistic routing protocol, EVA-DBR employs an adaptive forwarding area which can be resized and replaced according to the density and placement of the forwarding candidate nodes to enhance the energy efficiency and reliability. The results of our extensive simulation study indicate that EVA-DBR outperforms other protocols regarding the routing performance metrics.