Abstract: The area of three-dimensional (3D) underwater acoustic sensor networks (UW-ASNs) have attracted significant attention recently from both academia and industry due to its applications in detecting and observing phenomena that cannot be adequately observed by means of two-dimensional ocean bottom underwater acoustic sensor nodes. Many problems arise with 3D UW-ASNs that need to be solved in order to enable underwater monitoring in the new environment. Among them, providing efficient routing is very challenging due to the unique characteristics of 3D UW-ASNs.We proposed a geographic based routing protocol and a self-adaptive routing protocol which is adaptatire to 3D UW-ASNs with incomplete sets of failure nodes. The simulations demonstrate that our self-adaptive routing protocol can achieve a good tradeoff among packet delivery ratio,end-to-end delay and network throughput,while our basic geographic routing protocol can get a good performance in average end-to-end delay.

Key words: Underwater acoustic sensor networks, Three-dimensional, Routing protocol