A Taxonomy of Routing Techniques in Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Abstract

Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are finding different applications for offshore exploration and ocean monitoring. In most of these applications, the network consists of a significant number of sensor nodes deployed at different depth levels throughout the area of interest. Sensor nodes on the sea bed cannot communicate directly with the nodes near the surface level, so they require multihop communication assisted by an appropriate routing scheme. However, this appropriateness not only depends on network resources and application requirements, but environment constraints are involved as well. These factors all provide a platform where a resource aware routing strategy plays a vital role in fulfilling different application requirements with dynamic environment conditions. Realizing this fact, much of the attention has been given to construct a reliable scheme, and many routing protocols have been proposed in order to provide efficient route discoveries between the source and sink. In this chapter, the authors present a review and comparison of different algorithms proposed recently for underwater sensor networks. Later on, all of these have been classified into different groups according to their characteristics and functionalities.