Underwater Acoustic Communications and Networking: Recent Advances and Future Challenges

There has been a growing interest in underwater acoustic communications over the past 30 years because of its defense, offshore oil industry, marine commercial operations, oceanography, and marine research applications. As compared to initial communication systems, improved performance and robustness have resulted from continued research over the years. The authors aim to provide an overview, spanning this decade, of key underwater networking protocol and point-to-point communication technique developments. Insight into some of the open challenges and problems researchers in this field will face in the near future is also provided by the authors.