Void Handling in Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: A Quantitative Analysis

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is a promising technology with several open issues and challenges. UWSN communication has dependencies on acoustics instead of radio. The route maintenance is one of the difficult tasks in UWSNs due to the random behavior of water tides. The dynamic nature of water waves also poses void-holes in the network region due to which the routing path is severely affected. Meanwhile, numerous research work has been carried out to handle such void-hole problem. In this article, we perform a quantitative analysis on four void handling based routing protocols for UWSN, namely, Vector-Based Void Avoidance (VBVA), Void Aware Pressure Routing (VAPR), GEographic and opportunistic routing with Depth Adjustment-based topology control for communication Recovery (GEDAR), and Void Handling technique in Anchor Nodes assisted Cluster-based Routing Protocol (VH-ANCRP) to assess the performance. The performance metrics for quantitative analysis are data transfer rate, latency, energy cost, network lifespan, and number of redundant packets. NS3 is used for the simulation results. Simulation results expel that VH-ANCRP and GEDAR perform better than VAPR and VBVA in all aforementioned performance metrics.