Green-centric communication void avoidance for underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Recently, there is rapid interest in the study of Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN), which is due to it verse applications such as pollution monitoring, seismic monitoring, equipment monitoring, disaster prevention, tactical surveillance, oceanography data gathering, and assisted navigation. Meanwhile, the realization of these applications is confronted with some underwater limitations namely, acoustic channel constraint, limited bandwidth, and water pressure. Several routing algorithms have been developed to achieve efficient data gathering. However, these algorithms are challenged with communication void problem. The communication void problem leads to packet drop/error and high energy consumption in the course of data packet forwarding. Therefore, in this paper, an improved communication void avoidance mechanism for UWSN has been proposed for handling void hole during data packet forwarding considering dislodgment of sensor nodes. The performance of the proposed mechanism has been evaluated against the adapted adjustment mechanism to confirm its benefit based on different data packet forwarding and energy efficiency metrics.