Underwater Acoustic Sensor Network: Architecture, Challenges, Future Possibilities In the Perspective of IoT

The Internet of Things (IoT) paradigm has gradually become prevalent in all facets of life. Due to advancements in academia, business and industry, it may be possible to apply IoT to underwater surroundings, which have an effect on human life as well. On the other side, Smart oceans are offering endless hidden treasures for all developing nations to improve the overall economy by exploring the marine resources for generating revenue, as the majority of the earth surface is covered by the water bodies. Underwater acoustic sensor network (UASN) is the enabling technology between smart oceans and IoT techniques, which helps in exploration of the marine environments with tiny sensor nodes, movable data carriers (AUV's) and earth surface data processing centers (BS) to give sensed marine information as a service to the IoT applications. Hence, this paper examines and reviews the UASN in terms of the network architecture, data propagation models, environmental considerations, topology management, boundary detection, routing methods, and the effect of node's energy in enhancing the network lifetime. Some experimental results of node localization issue and deployment issues are represented here to give an overview of the work done on the major challenges of UASN. We contrasted the currently available approaches and their benefits and drawbacks to highlight potential research avenues for further development of underwater sensor networks.