Greedy Routing in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks: A Survey

Due to the significant advances of wireless sensor networks (WSNs), researchers are eager to use this technology in the subsea applications. Because of rapid absorption of high radio frequency in the water, acoustic waves are used as communication medium, which pose new challenges, including high propagation delay, high path loss, low bandwidth, and high-energy consumption. Because of these challenges and high movement of nodes by water flow, end-to-end routing methods used in most of existing routing protocols in WSNs are not applicable to underwater environments. Therefore, new routing protocols have been developed for underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWASNs) in which most of the routing protocols take advantage of greedy routing. Due to inapplicability of global positioning system (GPS) in underwater environments, finding location information of nodes is too costly. Therefore, based on a need for location information, we divided the existing greedy routing protocols into two distinctive categories, namely, location-based and location-free protocols. In addition, location-free category is divided into two subcategories based on method of collecting essential information for greedy routing, including beacon-based and pressure-based protocols. Furthermore, a number of famous routing protocols belonging to each category are reviewed, and their advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, these protocols are compared with each other based on their features.