Review of Underwater Mobile Sensor Network for ocean phenomena monitoring

Underwater Mobile Sensor Network (UWMSN) has marked a new era in ocean observation systems involving large scale ocean phenomena monitoring applications. These spatial and temporally varying applications demand multiple mobile entities for the collection of large amounts of data. This paper gives a concise view of the current state of the art of such networks comprising multiple Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs) and their challenges. It provides a literature review of the channel model and networking protocols of the physical layer, data link layer and network layer. Important algorithms and techniques for localization and time synchronization have also been reviewed. These algorithms play a huge role in a cooperative mission involving multiple AUVs, to achieve a common notion of time and to share the location information among the vehicles. Moreover, this paper includes a survey of various software platforms that support UWMSN, testbeds/real-time deployments of UWMSN developed by various research institutes/organizations and briefly discusses the recent advancement in the field of UWMSN.