Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are getting more importance in the oceanic exploration. The planet earth is basically a planet of water with less than 30 land mass available for humans to live on. However, the areas covered with water are important to mankind for the various resources which have been proven to be valuable. Such resources are gas, oil, marine products which can be used as food and other minerals. In view of the vast area in which these resources can be found, a network of sensors is necessary so that they can be explored. However, sensor networks may not be helpful in the exploration of these resources if they do not have a sufficiently good routing mechanism. Node mobility, 3-D spaces and horizontal communication links are some critical challenges to the researcher in designing new routing protocols for UWSNs. In this study, we have proposed a novel routing protocol called Layer by Layer Angle-Based Flooding (L2-ABF) to address the issues of continuous node movements, end-to-end delays and energy consumption. In L2-ABF, every node can calculate its flooding zone to forward data packets toward the sinks without using any explicit configuration or location information. The simulation results show that L2-ABF has some advantages over some existing flooding-based techniques and also can easily manage quick routing changes where node movements are frequent. © Maxwell Scientific Organization, 2014.