Currently, the Underwater Sensor Networks (UWSNs) is mainly an interesting area due to its ability to provide a technology to gather many valuable data from underwater environment such as tsunami monitoring sensor, military tactical application, environmental monitoring and many more. However, UWSNs is suffering from limited energy, high packet loss and the use of acoustic communication. In UWSNs most of the energy consumption is used during the forwarding of packet data from the source to the destination. Therefore, many researchers are eager to design energy efficient routing protocol to minimize energy consumption in UWSNs. As the opportunistic routing (OR) is the most promising method to be used in UWSNs, this paper focuses on the existing proposed energy efficient OR protocol in UWSNs. This paper reviews the existing proposed energy efficient OR protocol, classifying them into 3 categories namely sender-side-based, receiver-side-based and hybrid. Furthermore each of the protocols is reviewed in detail, and its advantages and disadvantages are discussed. Finally, we discuss potential future work research directions in UWSNs, especially for energy efficient OR protocol design
