Towards Energy-Efficient and Delay-Optimized Opportunistic Routing in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks for IoUT Platforms: An Overview and New Suggestions

In underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs), the reliable transfer of data from the source nodes located underwater to the destination nodes at the surface through the network of intermediate nodes is a significant challenge due to various unique characteristics of UASN such as continuous mobility of sensor nodes, increased propagation delay, restriction in energy, and heightened interference. Recently, the location-based opportunistic routing protocols seem to show potential by providing commendable quality of service (QoS) in the underwater environment. This study initially reviews all the latest location-based opportunistic routing protocols proposed for UASNs and discusses its possible limitations and challenges. Most of the existing works focus either on improving the QoS or on energy efficiency, and the few hybrid protocols that focus on both parameters are too complex with increased overhead and lack techniques to overcome communication voids. Further, this study proposes and discusses an easy-to-implement energy-efficient location-based opportunistic routing protocol (EELORP) that can work efficiently for various applications of UASN-assisted Internet of Underwater Things (IoUTs) platforms with reduced delay. We simulate the protocol in Aqua-Sim, and the results obtained show better performance than existing protocols in terms of QoS and energy efficiency.