Survey on Recent Advancements in Energy-Efficient Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have become highly efficient in conducting various operations in maritime environments. Compared to terrestrial wireless sensor networks, routing protocols in UWSNs are prone to high propagation delay, high energy consumption, low bandwidth, and low throughput. UWSNs are remotely located and operate without the need for human intervention. Most sensor batteries are energy restricted and very difficult to replace. One of the major challenges of UWSNs is the uneven utilization of energy resources, which reduces the network lifetime. Therefore, an energy-efficient routing mechanism is necessary to overcome the aforementioned problems. Many significant studies have attempted to realize this goal by designing energy-efficient routing protocols to provide efficient packet routing from source to destination. In this paper, we focus on discussing various energy-efficient routing protocols that are currently available for UWSNs, categorize them with a new taxonomy, and provide a comparative discussion. Finally, we present various research problems that remain open and challenges for future research.

Keywords

• Acoustic communication
• energy efficiency
• maritime environment
• network lifetime
• routing protocol
• underwater wireless sensor network