Survey on Latest Energy Based Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

In recent years underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have emerged as one of the most popular researched areas in the networking field due to its numerous applications in ocean exploration, underwater surveillance and pollution detection. With specific characteristics such as higher delay in transmission, continuously moving nodes, limited storage and battery, most of the routing protocols that work with traditional sensor networks cannot be used in underwater wireless sensor networks. It has been a challenge for researchers to route the data packets efficiently from the source to the destination. With low-cost sensor devices having limited transmit power and limited battery, it is a greater challenge to design energy efficient routing protocols for underwater wireless sensor networks. The objective of this paper is to analyze the working of the latest energy efficient protocols that has been proposed for underwater wireless sensor networks and to identify its issues and limitations. This analysis would help in designing optimized energy efficient routing protocols in future.