Simulation Tools for Underwater Sensor Networks: A Survey

In underwater sensor network(UWSN) research, it is highly expensive to deploy a complete test bed involving complex network structure and data links to validate a network protocol or an algorithm. This practical challenge points to the need of a simulation environment which can reproduce the actual underwater scenario without the loss of generality. Since so many simulators are proposed for UWSN simulation, the selection of an appropriate tool based on the research requirement is very important in validation and interpretation of results. This paper provides an in-depth survey of different simulation tools available for UWSN simulation. We compared the features offered by each tool, pre-requirements, and provide the run time experiences of some of the open source tools. We conducted simulation of sample scenarios in some of the open source tools and compared the results. This survey helps a researcher to identify a simulation tool satisfying their specific research requirements.