A survey on underwater wireless sensor networks routing algorithms

Considering their special features and numerous applications, sensor networks are noticed so much nowadays. A sub-group of these applications is underwater sensor networks, which encounter some challenges like reliable transportation, routing, MAC, positioning, limited bandwidth, high and variable propagation delay, defective underwater channels and low battery capacity. Acoustic technologies are a particular technology which can make strong underwater communications for Civilian and military applications. These networks are used in oceans for environmental monitoring, under sea discovery, unexpected events prevention, ships assisting, tactical monitoring and naval mine detection, but there are a lot of unhandled issues in these networks in large scale. Like all other networks, routing is the main challenge in underwater sensor networks and diverse protocols in routing field have been proposed to resolve these networks' shortcomings. In this survey, all types of routing protocols in underwater sensor networks are studied. Because of diversity of these approaches, only protocols which are common in positioning are mentioned.