Location-Free Void Avoidance Routing Protocol for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

The field of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) is one of the emerging areas of communication due to the number of marine applications. However, UASNs face several fundamental challenges like node movement, high propagation delay, low throughput, high bit-error-rate, low bandwidth, and void-node during communication. Void-node during routing is one of the major problems during routing, which causes high end-to-end delay to route the packets to the sink. The void-node is a fundamental challenge in UASNs and directly influences the UASNs in terms of the end-to-end delay, packet loss, and reliability of the UASNs. The main objective of this paper is to design a void-aware routing protocol referred to as Location-Free Void Avoidance Routing (LFVAR) protocol. It develops void-awareness among nodes in the UASNs and prevents forwarding of the packets to void and trap nodes. Further, LFVAR capable of selecting the efficient void-recovery path for the void-nodes present in the UASNs. Thus, it aims at reducing the end-to-end delay, lower energy consumption, higher packet delivery ratio, and increasing throughput during routing. The LFVAR protocol is implemented in UnetStack and further compared with the state-of-the-art Interference-aware routing (Intar) protocol. The simulation result shows that the packets in LFVAR reach the sink 32.32 % faster, consumes 20.54 % lower energy, and 9.8 % higher packet delivery ratio than Intar.