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Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are an enabling technology for many applications in commercial, military, and scientific domains. In some emergency response applications of UWSN, data dissemination is more important, therefore these applications are handled differently as compared to energy-focused approaches, which is only possible when propagation delay is minimized and packet delivery at surface sinks is assured. Packet delivery underwater is a serious concern because of harsh underwater environments and the dense deployment of nodes, which causes collisions and packet loss. Resultantly, re-transmission causes energy loss and increases end-to-end delay (DE2E). In this work, we devise a framework for the joint optimization of sink mobility, hold and forward mechanisms, adoptive depth threshold (dth) and data aggregation with pattern matching for reducing nodal propagation delay, maximizing throughput, improving network lifetime, and minimizing energy consumption. To evaluate our technique, we simulate the three-dimensional (3-D) underwater network environment with mobile sink and dense deployments of sensor nodes with varying communication radii. We carry out scalability analysis of the proposed framework in terms of network lifetime, throughput, and packet drop. We also compare our framework to existing techniques, i.e., Mobicast and iAMCTD protocols. We note that adapting varying dth based on node density in a range of network deployment scenarios results in a reduced number of re-transmissions, good energy conservation, and enhanced throughput. Furthermore, results from extensive …