A Review of Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) are a prominent research topic in academia and industry, with a wide range of underwater applications including ocean monitoring, seismic monitoring, environmental monitoring, and seabed exploration. However, UWSNs face a number of restrictions and obstacles, including high ocean interference and noise, long propagation times, narrow bandwidth, changeable network architecture, and sensor's battery life. One of the solutions to these problems is to build efficient routing protocols. A routing protocol can move data from a source node to a destination node in the network efficiently. A review of underwater routing protocols for UWSNs is presented in this paper. Existing underwater routing protocols are categorized into three categories: energy-based, data-based, and geographic information-based protocols. Recent underwater routing protocols are discussed in depth, by presenting their benefits, drawbacks and performance. In addition, We discuss challenges and future directions of underwater routing protocols, which can assist researchers interested to explore further this important research topic.