Underwater Sensor Network at Physical, Data Link and Network Layer - A Survey

Last 3 decades, there has been a growing interest in underwater acoustic communication because of its application in scientific exploration, commercial exploitation, oceanography and attack protection. Underwater acoustic technology is the enabling technology for these applications. The objective of this paper is to provide development in underwater communication of many autonomous and individual sensor nodes. They perform different operation such as data collection, storing data and forwarding operation. The problem of deploying such a network is communication range, battery, power, cost, and memory. In Underwater Sensor Network (UWSN) the lifetime of individual sensor node is limited. Due to power loss, if any of the node stops communicating then the coverage area of UWSN shrinks. Various Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network (UASN) physical layer links, large number Medium Access Control (MAC) protocols in data link layer and routing protocol in network layer have been surveyed. In this paper we do comparative study of these protocols at physical layer, data link layer and network layer.