Prospects and Challenges of Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networking: A Review

This paper presents the important milestones in the development and applications of underwater wireless communications. The primary application areas are monitoring of environmental changes, collecting marine and oceanic data etc. Towards achieving these goals, research is being carried out for the evolution of methodical communications and signal processing algorithms, design of modulation and coding schemes, multiple access methods. In the related field of communication networking, design of protocols to take care of propagation delays and power requirements are important factors. Many problems are still unresolved in the design of acoustic communication system, recent research in this area serve as encouragement for future work.