A Survey on Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks: Perspectives on Protocol Design for Signaling, MAC and Routing

TL;DR

This survey reviews the unique challenges and design considerations of underwater acoustic sensor networks, focusing on protocol design for signaling, MAC, and routing in the context of acoustic channel characteristics.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of UASN architecture, acoustic channel modeling, and protocol design challenges across different OSI layers, highlighting recent research directions.

Findings

Analysis of acoustic channel modeling challenges

Comparison of MAC and routing protocols for UASNs

Identification of open research issues in underwater network protocols

Abstract

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UASNs) are often used for environmental and industrial sensing in undersea/ocean space, therefore, these networks are also named underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs). Underwater sensor networks are different from other sensor networks due to the acoustic channel used in their physical layer, thus we should discuss about the specific features of these underwater networks such as acoustic channel modeling and protocol design for different layers of open system interconnection (OSI) model. Each node of these networks as a sensor needs to exchange data with other nodes; however, complexity of the acoustic channel makes some challenges in practice, especially when we are designing the network protocols. Therefore based on the mentioned cases, we are going to review general issues of the design of a UASN in this paper. In this regard, we firstly describe the network architecture for a typical 3D UASN, then we review the characteristics of the acoustic channel and the corresponding challenges of it and finally, we discuss about the different layers e.g. MAC protocols, routing protocols, and signal processing for the application layer of UASNs.