An Efficient Void Aware Framework for Enabling Internet of Underwater Things

Abstract

The Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT) is an emerging area in marine science and engineering. It has witnessed significant research and development attention from both academia and industries due to its growing underwater use cases in oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, seismic monitoring, tactical surveillance, and assisted navigation for waterway transport. Information dissemination in the underwater network environment is very critical considering network dynamism, unattainable nodes, and limited resources of the tiny IoUT devices. Existing techniques are majorly based on location-centric beacon messages, which results in higher energy consumption, and wastage of computing resources in tiny IoUT devices. Towards this end, this paper presents an efficient void aware (EVA) framework for information dissemination in IoUT environment. Network architecture is modeled considering potential void region identification in the underwater network environment. An efficient void aware (EVA) information dissemination framework is proposed focusing on detecting void network region, and intelligent void aware data forwarding. The comparative performance evaluation attests to the benefits of the proposed framework in terms of energy consumption, network lifetime, packet delivery ratio, and end-to-end delay for information dissemination in IoUT.