Data aggregation in underwater wireless sensor network: Recent approaches and issues.

Underwater Wireless Sensor Network (UWSN) technology is widely used in various underwater monitoring and exploration applications and has proven its high stature. Since many years various UWSN protocols have been designed or existing protocols are improvised for effective and qualitative research analysis. The data aggregation is one of the schemes that is widely been used along with UWSN protocols to achieve better results. Thus it is foremost required to present a periodical review on data aggregation. Herein we present a paper based on the survey of UWSN with data aggregation to highlight its benefits and limitations. Ambition behind this paper is to build interest of research fraternity towards future challenges identified on the basis of survey of existing approaches. The existing techniques that aggregate data are divided into cluster based, non-cluster based and other approaches. The existing techniques are analysed along with their advantages and disadvantages. Moreover, the performances of K-means, Distributed underwater clustering scheme and Round-based clustering approaches are compared in terms of delay, packet drop and energy consumption, with and without aggregation. Also the performance of Receiver Oriented Sleep Scheduling, Intra and Inter Cluster Communication and Energy Efficient Distributed Time Synchronization techniques are compared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]