Abstract: | Accurate localization of underwater acoustic sensor networks is one of the essential operations. The range-free DV-Hop technique is more acceptable due to its low hardware cost and simplicity than the range-based approach. But the main drawback of this basic DV-Hop method is low accuracy and link failure due to maintenance or short battery life during the continuous localization calculation in the underwater scenario. Most algorithms in this field do not pay enough attention to the mobility of the nodes. By examining the movement patterns of water, this manuscript uses a technique for UWSN localization based on a mobility prediction algorithm. This manuscript proposed a reference node-based multi-hop improved DV-Hop technique using School Topper Optimization (STO) and mobility prediction algorithms. This proposed scheme’s highlighted advantage is to reduce the localization error to identify the unknown target nodes using a reference node-based localization scheme using a mobility prediction algorithm without increasing the beacon nodes, and the multi-hop improved DV-Hop algorithm using STO significantly improved the link failure problem by iteratively selecting the different sets of the beacon nodes in the same scenario The simulation report has proved that our framework takes better computational time, has a better convergence rate by introducing the STO technique, provides 23.76% and 37.18% better avg. localization error and localization error variance, and 16.12% better coverage from PSODV-Hop and GSODV-Hop techniques. |