In this paper, we propose depth and reliability aware delay sensitive (DRADS) routing protocol for underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). We take motivation from underwater opportunistic routing (UWOR) protocol which introduces a new EEL| success (Fi) metric, i.e., the expected end-to-end latency from sender node i to sink. We consider two flaws in UWOR. First, in UWOR protocol, sensor node
... [Show full abstract] forwards the data packets to forwarder node which have higher reliability link (EEL α%), neglecting the depth of the forwarder node, which results in more hop counts. The coordination time of forwarder node's cluster is second flaw which increases the end-to-end latency. Therefore, we modify EEL| success (Fi) metric and introduce depth aware routing in DRADS. It performs reliable routing because, it is based on opportunistic routing (OR) scheme. Simulation results show 10% better energy utilization and 12% better network goodput as compared to UWOR.