Protocol Stack of Underwater Wireless Sensor Network: Classical Approaches and New Trends

The oceans and rivers remain the least explored frontiers on earth but due to frequent occurrences of disasters or calamities, the researchers have shown keen interest towards underwater monitoring. Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSN) envisioned as an aquatic medium for variety of applications like oceanographic data collection, disaster management or prevention, assisted navigation, attack protection, and pollution monitoring. Like terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN), UWSN consists of sensor nodes that collect the information and pass it to sink, however researchers have to face many challenges in executing the network in aquatic medium. Some of these challenges are mobile sensor nodes, large propagation delays, limited link capacity, and multiple message receptions. In this manuscript, broad survey of issues concerning underwater sensor networks is presented. We provide an overview of test beds, routing protocols, experimental projects, simulation platforms, tools and analysis that are available with research fraternity.