ABSTRACT Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) play a crucial role in various applications, including environmental monitoring, underwater exploration, marine communication, and disaster management. However, effective data transmission in underwater environments poses significant challenges due to high propagation delay, energy constraints, localization difficulties, and void hole issues. As the UWSN nodes are movable underwater, some of them may move far away from the relay, sensor, or sink nodes, which causes the void hole problem. Node localization with multi‐hop verification cooperation can help overcome these issues. In this paper, we propose a Cooperation with Four Hop‐by‐Hop Forwarding Verification (Co‐FHHV) scheme in UWSN to avoid the void hole and void node issues. This mechanism ensures that data moves through three intermediate relay nodes before reaching the sink node. By adding a fourth hop, each node transmits over a shorter distance, reducing energy depletion, and improving network lifetime. Each relay node performs a verification process to check for data integrity before forwarding the data. Using the localization approach to avoid the void hole is the basic motive of this article. Four verification approaches have been introduced, which utilize routing to identify the nearest nodes and activate them for communication. Each node in multiple hop‐to‐hop forwarding verification employs a discovery approach that attempts to avoid the void hole region and the void node. The Co‐FHHV scheme employs a method to select routes with maximum residual energy and minimal hops for efficient data delivery. It also utilizes a forwarder selection strategy based on sensor priority and energy thresholds to extend the UWSN lifetime, improve energy efficiency, ensure node accurate localization, and maintain stability. The scheme used sink nodes, sensor nodes, relay nodes, and localization beacons. The proposed work is tested under multiple simulation scenarios, and the obtained results have been evaluated with the existing underwater communication schemes. The obtained results have demonstrated the excellent performance of the Co‐FHHV scheme, which is considered the best among all other Schemes.
Hussain et al. (Thu,) studied this question.