A comparative study on underwater communications for enabling C/U plane splitting based hybrid UWSNs

Abstract

Underwater wireless communications (UWCs) play a major role in both civilian and military applications. The features of the underwater transmission media are big challenges towards the design of efficient and robust UWCs. Many types of propagation waves have been investigated for UWCs such as acoustic, electromagnetic, optical and magnetic induction. Underwater acoustic communications have long transmission range, but with limited data rate and high-power consumption. Meanwhile, electromagnetic and optical UWCs can achieve high data rate but with difficulties in establishing reliable communication links due to their short communication distances and alignment problem respectively. Recently, magnetic induction has been introduced as a new physical layer for UWCs providing unique features such as high data rate and low propagation delay, but it still suffers from high propagation losses especially in sea water. In this paper, the performance of these different UWCs paradigms are explored and compared in terms of energy efficiency and total system throughput under different scenarios. Then, a hybrid UWC network based on an interoperability among these different technologies is suggested.