Comparative Analysis of Routing Protocols for Under-Water Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) are significantly different from terrestrial sensor networks in the following aspects: low bandwidth, high latency, node mobility, high error probability, and 3-dimensional space. These new features bring many challenges to the network protocol design of UWSNs. The communication range of underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) is limited, and the nodes are equipped with limited power battery whose replacement is expensive due to underwater harsh environment. Moreover, the networks including small number of nodes have communication problems for long ranges. In this paper, we evaluate the performance of three classical location-based routing protocols (namely, VBF, HH-VBF, and VBVA) for underwater wireless sensor networks in terms of three critical performance metrics for dynamic network topology. Our comparison includes energy consumption, end-to-end delay, and packet delivery ratio.