A Survey on MAC Protocol Approaches for Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks

Since communications in the Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have limited resources and capabilities, designing an efficient and reliable Media Access Control (MAC) protocol for UWSNs faces many challenges. UWSNs have limited bandwidth, power, memory, long propagation delay, high Bit Error Rate (BER), and unreliable communication. Current MAC protocols that have been designed for Terrestrial Wireless Sensor Networks (TWSNs) are not suitable for UWSNs. While the software-based mechanisms promise many benefits to TWSN, few proposal designs introduced MAC protocols based on software-based mechanisms for UWSNs. The software-based approach is a flexible one that helps to change system parameters of all layers with no need for additional hardware. In this article, we focus on presenting a survey of the state of the art of the recent development of MAC protocols for UWSNs from recent literature followed by a discussion of the characteristics and limitations of each MAC protocol. This article also evaluates the channel transmission and compares the performance of four different MAC protocol approaches to identify the most suitable one for the underwater oil/gas pipelines application in terms of end-to-end delay, energy consumption, Packet Delivery Ratio (PDR), the total number of collisions, and throughput using different network loads.