IEEE Access Special Section Editorial: Underwater Wireless Communications and Networking

Underwater wireless communications (UWC) has been playing an important role in marine activities for the second half of the 20th century. Ranging from military purposes in its early stages to today’s industrial and non-profit applications such as environmental monitoring, oceanographic data collection, disaster monitoring, and underwater resource exploration, there has been a growing interest in the realization of underwater wireless networks. However, practical applications often require significant data bandwidth. Such requirements are not always met by the design of current UWC systems, which are challenged by the unique and harsh conditions of underwater communication channels, including for example severe attenuation, multipath dispersion, and limited capability to exploit channel resources. Recently, many academic and industrial researchers have worked on the improvement of UWC systems by augmenting them with state-of-the-art information and communication technologies. There have been reports of new results and insight on the fundamental theories and practical implementations of UWC systems, i.e., UWC channel models and estimation, digital signal processing, advanced transceiver design, multiple access (MAC), and routing and upper-layer protocols, aswell as successful cross-layer design implementations.