UNDERWATER BASED ADHOC NETWORKS: A brief survey to its challenges, feasibility and issues

Wireless mobile Adhoc network has been widely used in a variety of practical applications. The major advantage of using these networks is that it does not rely on existing infrastructure for communicating between its nodes. Generally, these networks on the basis of deployment scenario of nodes are classified as MANET, VANET, and FANET. However, a similar concept of these wireless ad-hoc mobile networks can also be applied in underwater based applications, where a group of mobile nodes, submerged in water, forming a wireless ad-hoc network, are deployed to coordinate and communicate themselves, to carry out useful tasks. A major portion of the sea is unexplored till today and these networks could be of high advantage and have huge potential in surveillance, monitoring, military, geological activity, marine life monitoring, and many others. However, less work has been done in this area. The objective of the paper is to highlights the advantages, issues, challenges, in building such a realistic system. Moreover different applications scenario, future perspective has been proposed where these networks would be highly useful.

I. Introduction

Water or oceans nearly covers the 70 percent of the earth's total area but, more than 80 percent of these areas are unmapped and unexplored[I] Due to the high difficulty in underwater monitoring and exploration, various underwater unmanned vehicles equipped with sophisticated sensors are being deployed to perform this task. However, individual vehicles cannot be specialized in doing a variety of task simultaneously. Further, if we want to add different functionalities on a single system it would increase its physical size of the individual vehicle hence the sophistication and its cost. A better option is rather having a group of vehicles or sensor connected through an ad-hoc network. Each node performing a different specific task, able to coordinate and communicate frequently with others. This model can be considered as an underwater based mobile ad-hoc network (UWAN), where the different nodes could communicate and coordinate without using underlying or fixed architecture.