A novel efficient forwarding protocol for 3-D underwater wireless sensor networks

A novel efficient forwarding protocol (NEFP) for 3-D underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is proposed in this paper. Three strategies are adopted in NEFP. Firstly, the forwarding zone is presented to avoid the unnecessary forwarding. Secondly, in order to balance the energy consumption and reduce the collisions between the neighboring nodes, the time interval of the nodes for holding the received packets is calculated. In addition, NEFP models the forwarding probability as Markov chains, which increase the adaptation to the dynamic topology. We describe NEFP, implement it and evaluate its performance using Aqua-sim. Simulation results with different number of nodes indicate that NEFP significantly outperforms VBF, exhibiting packet delivery fraction gains up to 60%. Moreover, the average end-to-end delay can be also decreased up to 50%.