Abstract
In the task of data routing in Internet of Things enabled volatile underwater environments, providing better transmission and maximizing network communication performance are always challenging. Many network issues such as void holes and network isolation occur because of long routing distances between nodes. Void holes usually occur around the sink because nodes die early due to the high energy consumed to forward packets sent and received from other nodes. These void holes are a major challenge for I‐UWSANs and cause high end‐to‐end delay, data packet loss, and energy consumption. They also affect the data delivery ratio. Hence, this paper presents an energy efficient watchman based flooding algorithm to address void holes. First, the proposed technique is formally verified by the Z‐Eves toolbox to ensure its validity and correctness. Second, simulation is used to evaluate the energy consumption, packet loss, packet delivery ratio, and throughput of the network. The results are compared with well‐known algorithms like energy‐aware scalable reliable and void‐hole mitigation routing and angle based flooding. The extensive results show that the proposed algorithm performs better than the benchmark techniques.