Underwater communication has gained great interest among the researchers as it plays a key role in the surveillance and maintenance of offshore explorations, monitoring and oceanography research. Inorder to facilitate and achieve these scientific requirements more underwater devices and unmanned vehicles have been deployed for the transfer of information. Acoustic and optical underwater communications are the predominantly convincing techniques which have gained the research attention. Though there are tremendous developments in the field of these underwater communication techniques, there always exist some prominent issues which have kept this communication still a challenge. The limitation in the bandwidth of acoustic communication has led the way for optical communication for its high data rate with significant less power consumption and reduced computation complexities. However, the key challenges for optical communication have been put forward by the basic nature of ocean. In this paper, an extensive overview on the issues and challenges in underwater acoustic and optical communication such as absorption, attenuation, scattering, turbulence, various sources of noises, bandwidth, modulation schemes etc. are extensively reviewed and the issues identified put forth the future work in underwater communication.
Volume 11 | 02-Special Issue
Pages: 765-776