Enhanced Energy Aware and Void Avoidance Routing Protocol Based on Vector Based Forwarding for Underwater Acoustic Wireless Sensor Network

Almost seventy one percent of the earth is covered with water, making it crucial to human survival. Over the years, monitoring, and discovery of natural resources such as salt, crude oil etc has increased the importance of the oceanic world. With the rapid growth of technology, the discovery and monitoring of natural resources in the water has led to autonomous communication that gives rise to the internet of underwater things. Among the setbacks experienced by the underwater sensor network are sensor nodes mobility and energy constraint as the nodes are powered by limited battery resources which makes it quite difficult to replace or recharge once deployed. Routing is essential for the sensor nodes to exchange information and transmit data from source to destination. To tackle this problem, a routing protocol that is energy conserving is crucially required. Hence, this paper proposes an underwater energy efficient and void avoidance routing protocol named enhanced vector-based forwarding (ENHVBF) which examines the sensor nodes' energy level for successful communication. AQUASIM-NG simulator for NS-3 was used in measuring performance of ENHVBF. Obtained result indicates an increase in performance for ENH-VBF regarding energy consumption and packet delivery ratio when compared with other routing protocols.