Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UASNs) are a prominent research area in academia and industry. UASNs are used in a wide range of applications, including ocean monitoring, environmental monitoring, and underwater surveillance. However, UASNs face a number of challenges like high ocean interference and noise, high propagation delay, low bandwidth, and limited battery life. In addition, most underwater applications demand efficient routing. Selecting the optimal next hop is important to ensure reliable and efficient packet delivery. This paper proposes an attribute fetching and node ranking mechanism to be used in a routing protocol. The source node obtains the attributes from its neighbors and ranks the nodes in decreasing order of priority. The priorities can be used to choose the best next hop in a routing protocol. The proposed mechanism is implemented in UnetStack, an agent-based underwater simulator.