The next-generation of wireless network 6G is envisioned to achieve seamless global full coverage, and provide ultra-high-speed and extreme low delay network to connect the Internet of Everything (IoE) on the Earth. To this end, as the space-air-ground-underwater integrated network is a solid foundation of 6G, it is critical to develop reliable and robust cross-boundary communication techniques to connect the sky and the ocean. However, due to the harsh environment-induced channel complexity of different transmission media, penetrating through the air/water interface seamlessly faces significant challenges. In this paper, we present a comprehensive review of recent progress of air/water cross-boundary communications, and group the existing works into three categories, such as 1) optical direct communication, 2) relay-based communication, and 3) non-optical direct communication, and then summarize them respectively. The three types of cross-boundary approaches have their own pros and cons which are suitable for different application scenarios. Among them, the optical direct communication has made tremendous progress recently. However, the volatile wavy surface and depth-temperature-dependent parameters make it a great challenge to build robust communication links. Moreover, the misalignment caused by the dynamics of the channel severely degrades the performance and limits their practical applications. To tackle these challenges, we summarize the complex channel characteristics, analyze the causes of the misalignment and provide potential solutions. In the end of this paper, we also discuss future research directions and hope to inspire expanding research on the air/water cross-boundary communications to further propel towards the space-air-ground-ocean integrated network in 6G.

The ocean covers nearly two-thirds of the surface on the Earth, and there has been great interest in developing underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSNs) to help us explore the ocean realm. A great deal of efforts have been devoted to it, and significant progress has been made since the beginning of 2000s. However, most of the networks are isolatedly developed currently, inherently hardware-based and application-oriented with inflexible closed-form architectures, which are difficult to reconfigure, reprogram and evolve. They also lack the capability in sharing resources, and are far from service-oriented networks. These limitations impair their capacity for wide range of applications. To further propel the development of UWSNs, next-generation UWSNs have been proposed recently, which are robust, flexible, adaptive, programmable, support resource-sharing feature and are easy to manage and evolve. Moreover, a number of novel software-defined techniques and paradigms, such as software-defined radio (SDR), cognitive acoustic radio (CAR), network function virtualization (NFV), software-defined networking (SDN), Internet of underwater things (IoUTs) and sensor-cloud, have been emerging. These software-defined technologies have the capability of softwarizing network resources, and then redefining them to satisfy diverse application requirements, improve resource utilization efficiency and simplify network management. Consequently, these evolving technologies are envisioned as critical building blocks and major driving forces, which will transform conventional UWSNs towards software-based, programmable, user-customizable and service-oriented next-generation UWSNs. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of existing works on implementing these techniques, and also present discussions for future research. We hope to inspire more active research on these areas and take a step further towards realizing next-generation UWSNs.

QUasi-Affine TRansformation Evolutionary algorithm (QUATRE) is a new optimization algorithm based on population for complex multiple real parameter optimization problems in real world. In this paper, a novel multi-group multi-choice communication strategy algorithm for QUasi-Affine TRansformation Evolutionary (MM-QUATRE) algorithm is proposed to solve the disadvantage that the original QUATRE is always easily to fall into local optimization in the strategy of updating bad nodes with multiple groups and multiple choices. We compared it with other intelligent algorithms, the most advanced PSO variant, parallel PSO (P-PSO) variant, native QUATRE and parallel QUATRE (P-PSO) under CEC2013 large-scale optimization test suite. Thus, the performance of MM-QUATRE was verified. The conclusion that the MM-QUATRE algorithm is superior to other intelligent algorithms is proved by the experimental results. In addition, the application results of MM-QUATRE algorithm (MM-QUATRE-RSSI) based on RSSI in WSN node localization were analyzed and studied. The results appear that this method has higher localization accuracy than other similar algorithms.

LDB: Localization with Directional Beacons for Sparse 3D Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks

Ocean and water basically cover the major parts of our planet. To obtain the best utilization of the underlying resources on these parts of the Earth, people have made some research advancements. Specifically, the research on underwater wireless acoustic sensor networks (UWA-SNs) has made great progress. However, wide deployment of UWA-SNs is far from a reality due to several reasons. One important reason is that offshore deployment and field-level experiments of ocean-centric applications are both expensive and labor intensive. Other alternatives to attain this objective are to conduct simulation or experimentation that can reduce cost and accelerate the research activities and their outcomes. However, designing efficient and reliable simulation and experimentation platforms have proven to be more challenging beyond the expectation. In this article, we explore the main techniques (including their pros and cons) and components to develop simulation and experimentation platforms and provide a comprehensive survey report in this area. We classify simulation and experimentation platforms based on some typical criteria and then provide useful guidelines for researchers on choosing suitable platforms in accordance with their requirements. Finally, we address some open and un-resolved issues in this context and provide some suggestions on future research.

Underwater acoustic sensor networks (UWA-SNs) are envisioned to perform monitoring tasks over the large portion of the world covered by oceans. Due to economics and the large area of the ocean, UWA-SNs are mainly sparsely deployed networks nowadays. The limited battery resources is a big challenge for the deployment of such long-term sensor networks. Unbalanced battery energy consumption will lead to early energy depletion of nodes, which partitions the whole networks and impairs the integrity of the monitoring datasets or even results in the collapse of the entire networks. On the contrary, balanced energy dissipation of nodes can prolong the lifetime of such networks. In this paper, we focus on the energy balance dissipation problem of two types of sparsely deployed UWA-SNs: underwater moored monitoring systems and sparsely deployed two-dimensional UWA-SNs. We first analyze the reasons of unbalanced energy consumption in such networks, then we propose two energy balanced strategies to maximize the lifetime of networks both in shallow and deep water. Finally, we evaluate our methods by simulations and the results show that the two strategies can achieve balanced energy consumption per node while at the same time prolong the networks lifetime.