A secure and energy-efficient opportunistic routing protocol with void avoidance for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Recently, underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) have gained wide attention due to their numerous applications in underwater surveillance, oil leakage detection, assisted navigation, and disaster prevention. With unique characteristics like increased propagation delay, constant mobility of sensor nodes, high error rate, and limitations in energy and interference, efficient routing of data packets from the source node to the destination is a major challenge in UASNs. Most of the protocols proposed for traditional sensor networks do not work well in UASNs. Although many protocols have been specifically proposed for underwater environments, the aim of most of them is to improve only the quality of service (QoS) in the network. The security of the transmitted data, energy efficiency of the participating nodes, and handling of communication voids are three significant challenges that need to be adequately addressed in UASNs. In this research work, a secure and energy-efficient opportunistic routing protocol with void avoidance (SEEORVA) is proposed. This protocol uses the latest opportunistic routing strategy for reliable data delivery in the network and also provides priority to the nodes having energy above a specific threshold in the forwarding process, thereby increasing the lifetime and energy efficiency in the network. The transmitted messages are encrypted using a secure lightweight encryption technique. The protocol is also integrated with a strategy to handle the communication voids in the network. Simulation results with Aqua-Sim validate the better performance of the proposed system compared to the existing ones.