Delay Tolerance in Underwater Wireless Communications: A Routing Perspective

Abstract

Similar to terrestrial networks, underwater wireless networks (UWNs) also aid several critical tasks including coastal surveillance, underwater pollution detection, and other maritime applications. Currently, once underwater sensor nodes are deployed at different levels of the sea, it is nearly impossible or very expensive to reconfigure the hardware, for example, battery. Taking this issue into account, considerable amount of research has been carried out to ensure minimum energy costs and reliable communication between underwater nodes and base stations. As a result, several different network protocols were proposed for UWN, including MAC, PHY, transport, and routing. Recently, a new paradigm was introduced claiming that the intermittent nature of acoustic channel and signal resulted in designing delay tolerant routing schemes for the UWN, known as an underwater delay tolerant network. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive survey of underwater routing protocols with emphasis on the limitations, challenges, and future open issues in the context of delay tolerant network routing.

Underwater Networked Wireless Sensor Data Collection for Computational Intelligence Techniques: Issues, Challenges, and Approaches

“…Similarly some techniques are still under testing for data collection purpose. Rahman et al [8] projected a technique for the delay tolerant networks (DTN) where many efforts have been done in developing the architecture and algorithms for data collection in UWSN, which can be characterized by the delays for the long message and some frequent partitions. To solve that problem an enhanced version of the model has been developed in which current state can be known for the DTN and also various adaptive routing protocols have been proposed for the UWSN.…”

“…To solve that problem an enhanced version of the model has been developed in which current state can be known for the DTN and also various adaptive routing protocols have been proposed for the UWSN. Bouk et al [9] proposed a delay tolerant data-dolphin scheme have been proposed for the energy efficient in UWSN. Mobile elements which can be easily controlled or can be controllable are proposed for the efficient transmission of data in the underwater environment.…”

Adaptive Node Clustering for Underwater Sensor Networks

“…Monitoring of an underwater environment and communication is essential for many applications. The scope of these applications ranges from observing climate, underwater environment, marine ecology, natural calamities, navigation, and transmission of images to remote side on land, offshore investigation, surveillance and other military applications [ 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 ].…”

“…Propagation delay is another issue which cannot be neglected for efficient routing. Propagation delay of oceanic signals is very high and is 2 × 10 5 time high than the propagation delay in WSNs [ 5 ]. For long distance communication in underwater sensor networks, oceanic waves are used which can travel thousands of kilometers at low frequency and high power [ 11 ].…”

Selection of Optimal Deployment and Routing Configurations in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks for Avoiding Energy Holes

“…An underwater channel requires exclusive and tough characteristics. Indeed, the channel's bandwidth is limited, the attenuation is frequency-dependent and significant, the propagation delays are high and variable, and the battery power is limited [2]. For these reasons, proposing network protocols specifically dedicated for the underwater environment confronts serious challenges.…”