A Study on Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWWSNs)

Abstract

Acoustic communication is considered as the technique of sending and receiving messages below water. It may be treated as the ideal communication in aqua applications.Acoustic transmission, innate to the aquatic environment and used in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs), presents its own challenges in the terms of energy consumption, long propagation delay, and available bandwidth. These challenges are difficult to directly adapt in the underwater sensor networks which have been already proved in the terrestrial networks. End-to-end delay is the main element for delay sensitive underwater sensor networks. In this work, the idea of opportunistic based routing is applied for maximising the performance of the network while meeting the end to end delay requirements for delay sensitive UWSN applications.  To improve the data collection in UWSNs is through the design of routing protocols considering the unique characteristics of the underwater acoustic communication and the highly dynamic network topology.