Performance analysis of energy-efficient MAC protocols for underwater sensor networks

Recent technological advancements in underwater communications offer new challenges and opportunities for underwater sensor networks (UWSNs). There is an increasing consensus on the requirement to put energy conservation at the top of the research agenda, and as one of the most critical and compelling current research issues. In UWSNs, energy conservation is very significant because of in adequate power source, and also because depleted batteries cannot be re-energized or replaced when exhausted. Recently, many MAC protocols for UWSNs have been proposed which are usually based on variants of protocols from terrestrial counter parts. This paper attempts to provide a brief survey of communication architecture including selection of communication carrier and sources of energy consumption for UWSNs. The paper also provides a comprehensive survey of MAC protocols for UWSNs from recent literatures, and their classification and comparison based on their energy saving methods. Finally, a simulation based performance assessment of the MAC protocols has been carried out to compare their performance emphasizing on their energy efficiency, throughput and packet delivery ratio.