A Survey of Existing Medium Access Control (MAC) for Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN)

Underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) consist of a certain number of sensors that interact to send the sensed data to the sink node and perform collaborative task. Most UWSN choose acoustic as a communication medium for wireless transmission. However, electromagnetic waves are also offer a great merit in special underwater environment such as shallow water. UWSN is significantly different from terrestrial sensor networks in many aspects such as mobility of sensor nodes due to water current, propagation delay and propagation loss. These distinctions feature of underwater sensor network pose many new challenges for delivering information from sensor nodes to sink node effectively in UWSN. To achieve reliable data transfer in underwater sensor network scenarios, a new event MAC protocol need to be developed to provide energy efficient and reliable upstream data transfer.