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 topologyand then to exclude them from the routing paths using a passiveparticipation approach. To the best of our knowledge, EVA-DBRis the first fully stateless routing protocol which can locally detectand bypass the trapped nodes in addition to the void nodes inUWSNs. The updating phase for sending the control packets isperformed with the least possible cost, by eliminating the needfor ACK packets. As an opportunistic routing protocol, EVADBRemploys an adaptive forwarding area which can be resizedand replaced according to the density and placement of theforwarding candidate nodes to enhance the energy efficiency andreliability. The results of our extensive simulation study indicatethat EVA-DBR outperforms other protocols regarding the routingperformance metrics.