A Comprehensive Survey of Energy-Efficient MAC and Routing Protocols for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) have become highly efficient in performing different operations in oceanic environments. Compared to terrestrial wireless sensor networks (TWSNs), MAC and routing protocols in UWSNs are prone to low bandwidth, low throughput, high energy consumption, and high propagation delay. UWSNs are located remotely and do not need to operate with any human involvement. In UWSNs, the majority of sensor batteries have limited energy and very difficult to replace. The uneven use of energy resources is one of the main problems for UWSNs, which reduce the lifetime of the network. Therefore, an energy-efficient MAC and routing techniques are required to address the aforementioned challenges. Several important research projects have been tried to realize this objective by designing energy-efficient MAC and routing protocols to improve efficient data packet routing from Tx anchor node to sensor Rx node. In this article, we concentrate on discussing about different energy-efficient MAC and routing protocols which are presently accessible for UWSNs, categorize both MAC and routing protocols with a new taxonomy, as well as provide a comparative discussion. Finally, we conclude by presenting various current problems and research difficulties for future research.