Energy-efficiency and reliability in MAC and routing protocols for underwater wireless sensor network

Underwater wireless sensor network (UWSN) technology has introduced a new flux to a whole gamut of application domains such as scientific exploration, commercial exploitation, underwater disaster prevention, etc. Such diversity of UWSN has gained prominence to the researchers quite fast and has marked this field of research as one of the emerging ones. With extensive researches conducted in this field, several design challenges have been experienced and explored by the network designers. Large propagation delay, low bandwidth, frequent loss of connectivity, variability of sound speed, limitation on source of energy, etc. are the key challenges, which are identified as necessary issues for establishing efficient and reliable UWSN. To address these issues, several MAC and routing protocols for UWSN have been proposed by the researchers during the last decade. In this review, the core design aspects for an ideal UWSN are identified which are energy-efficiency and reliability. These design aspects are evaluated in terms of energy consumption and communication efficiency - in order to provide an insight to the network designers on ideal design metrics. It is found that the protocols are highly selective, and the fitness of any protocol depends solely on the application and design requirements, which is addressed by this review. This paper also provides a comprehensive overview through comparison and simulation to analyze and summarize the MAC and routing protocols under concern.