This thesis presents a study about the problem of data gathering in the inhospitable
underwater environment. Besides long propagation delays and high error probability,
continuous node movement also makes it difficult to manage the routing information
during the process of data forwarding. In order to overcome the problem of large
propagation delays and unreliable link quality, many algorithms have been proposed
and some of them provide good solutions for these issues, yet continuous node
movements still need attention. Considering the node mobility as a challenging task,
a distributed routing scheme called Hop-by-Hop Dynamic Addressing Based (H2-
DAB) routing protocol is proposed where every node in the network will be assigned
a routable address quickly and efficiently without any explicit configuration or any
dimensional location information. According to our best knowledge, H2-DAB is first
addressing based routing approach for underwater wireless sensor networks
(UWSNs) and not only has it helped to choose the routing path faster but also
efficiently enables a recovery procedure in case of smooth forwarding failure. The
proposed scheme provides an option where nodes is able to communicate without
any centralized infrastructure, and a mechanism furthermore is available where
nodes can come and leave the network without having any serious effect on the rest
of the network. Moreover, another serious issue in UWSNs is that acoustic links are
subject to high transmission power with high channel impairments that result in
higher error rates and temporary path losses, which accordingly restrict the
efficiency of these networks. The limited resources have made it difficult to design a
protocol which is capable of maximizing the reliability of these networks. For this
purpose, a Two-Hop Acknowledgement (2H-ACK) reliability model where two
copies of the same data packet are maintained in the network without extra burden
on the available resources is proposed. Simulation results show that H2-DAB can
easily manage during the quick routing changes where node movements are very
frequent yet it requires little or no overhead to efficiently complete its tasks
