## 5 Simulation Results
This behavior avoids the overburdening of the same forwarder node repeatedly that, in turn, results in its rapid death. The response time of a forwarder changes when it moves with water currents. This, in consequence, ensures that multiple nodes are selected as forwarders and a single node is not overburdened and made depleted of its battery power. This behavior is not addressed in the NEFP or EHRDBR protocols. As a result, nodes died with the slowest rate in the LF-IEHM protocol for almost the first 58 rounds. As the rounds progressed, nodes began dying, particularly nodes close to the water surface with a low pressure level. This causes the formation of energy holes, which results in packet drop. In order to overcome these energy holes, a sender node in LF-IEHM increases its transmission range. This results in a greater energy consumption by nodes. Consequently, nodes died with the highest rate in LF-IEHM after 58 rounds. Nodes died with the highest rate in the NEFP for almost the first 58 rounds. This was because the NEFP selects forwarders close to the water surface (the sink) and within a restricted zone. Such nodes are selected frequently for data forwarding, which makes them depleted of their energy and causes them to die. After 58 rounds, nodes died at a faster rate in EHRDBR than in the NEFP because of the death of overburdened low-depth nodes in EHRDBR and the extra cost of energy hole repairing. Figure 5 shows the plot of energy consumption. Initially, for the first several rounds, the energy consumption was almost the same in all of the protocols. This was because more forwarder nodes were available to route data along the best available paths in all the protocols. After this, the nodes began to die, and the best available paths were no longer available. Following this, a sender node in LF-IEHM increased its transmission range and consumed more power to select one or more forwarder nodes for data forwarding. This increase in the transmission range takes place when a sender node does not find any neighbor node to select it as a forwarder node. This process avoids packet loss due to unavailability of forwarder nodes at the expense of more energy consumption. This leads to the highest energy consumption in LF-IEHM. The energy consumption curve of LF-IEHM shows remarkable deviation from the corresponding curves of the EHRDBR and NEFP. protocols between the 22 nd and 100 th rounds. This means LF-IEHM consumes energy with the fastest rate in this interval of rounds. This is because sender nodes begin to consume more power by increasing their transmission range to forward packets as forwarder nodes die in their neighborhood. The sender nodes in the NEFP select forwarder nodes in a restricted zone. In contrast, the sender nodes in EHRDBR select forwarder nodes in the full transmission range. Additionally, EHRDBR involves redundant packet transmission. The hole repairing also consumes energy in EHRDBR. As a result, the energy consumption is higher in EHRDBR than in the NEFP. Figure 6 shows the total number of packets received at the sink. As a result of the variable transmission range and unique packet holding time of the nodes, LF-IEHM had the greatest number of packets received at the sink. In LF-IEHM, when a sender node does not find any neighbor, it increases its transmission range to include one or more forwarder nodes. This increases the probability of the packets' reception at the sink. It also ensures the minimization of packet loss when the nodes close to the water surface die. In addition, the unique packet holding time of every node ensures that no two or more nodes forward data packets at the same time. This reduces interference during data forwarding, which, in turn, minimizes packet loss. As a result, LF-IEHM had the largest number of packets received at the sink compared to EHRDBR and the NEFP, for which every node has a fixed transmission range. Initially for almost the first 25 rounds, the number of packets received at the sink was roughly the same for EHRDBR and the NEFP.