Beacon-based routing protocols for underwater acoustic sensor networks

Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks (UW-ASN) are provisioned with limited bandwidth, long variable propagation delay, limited available energy, highly unreliable acoustic channels, and random node mobility. Consequently, efficient data routing between source destination pair requires UW-ASN to apply a technology different than terrestrial networks. For the past few years researchers have proposed many robust and efficient routing protocols for UW-ASN, thus reviewing the challenges posed by stringent underwater environment. These protocols can be broadly categorized into localization based and localization-free protocols. This paper presents a critical review of beacon-based localization-free routing protocols and suggest possible solution to improve the working of studied beacon based protocols. This work categorizes beacon based protocols into hop-by-hop, end-to-end, single, and multiple parameters based forwarding protocols. This categorization will help to differentiate and identify the requirements for the development of new beacon-based protocols. Finally, this paper presents performance comparison based on simulation results and outlines the research gap and future directions.