Systematic Review of Fault Tolerant Techniques in Underwater Sensor Networks

Sensor networks provide services to a broad range of applications ranging from intelligence service surveillance to weather forecasting. While most of the sensor networks are terrestrial, Underwater Sensor Networks (USN) are an emerging area. One of the unavoidable and increasing challenges for modern USN technology is tolerating faults, i.e., accepting that hardware is imperfect, and coping with it. Fault Tolerance tends to have more impact in underwater than in terrestrial environment as the latter is generally more forgiving. Moreover, reaching the malfunctioning devices for replacement and maintenance under water is harder and more costly. The current paper is the first to provide an overview of fault-tolerant, particularly cross-layer fault-tolerant, techniques in USNs. In the paper, we present a systematic survey of the techniques, introduce a taxonomy of the Fault Tolerance tasks, present a categorized list of articles, and list the open research issues within the area.