Underwater Sensor Networks and Underwater Cyber-Physical Systems

Dear Colleagues,

The Earth is a water planet, with two-thirds of its surface covered by water. The planet’s water environment is a critical resource for society. It has a tremendous amount of resources, is home to countless species, and has a massive impact on the Earth’s climate change. For decades, there has been significant interest in exploring and monitoring underwater environments. Despite all efforts, we know more about the outer space than our own aquatic environments.

The idea of developing sensor networks and cyber-physical systems for the underwater world has recently emerged as a promising solution to this problem. The resulting underwater sensor networks and underwater cyber-physical systems could have the potential to transform the way we understand, explore and utilize our sparsely-sampled oceans, estuaries, lakes and rivers. They would fill in the much needed technology gap for a wide range of aquatic applications, such as oceanographic data collection, pollution monitoring, offshore underwater remote operations, disaster detection and early warning, national security and defense, and natural resource exploitation.

Due to the unique characteristics of the underwater environment, however, existing solutions for terrestrial networks and systems could suffer heavy performance degradation if directly applied to underwater scenarios.  This calls for creative thinking and re-evaluation of some principles in network and system designs.

This Special Issue will focus on challenges, novel research in theoretical models, algorithms, platforms, infrastructure, and experimental results from field trials. It is intended that this Special Issue will show the state-of-the-art in underwater sensor networks and underwater cyber-physical systems. Topics of interests include, but are not limited to:

• Underwater sensor networks, including theories, protocol designs and architecture
• Underwater cyber-physical systems, including designs, implementations and architecture
• Underwater communications, including acoustic, optical, RF, magneto-inductive and wired, etc.
• Underwater robotics, including underwater localization, navigation, control, communication, coordination, human operator interaction, etc.
• Underwater power systems, including power efficient algorithms, low power designs, underwater renewable energy, underwater wireless charging and power harvesting
• Modeling, simulation, test beds, underwater applications and case study
• Sustainable and environmental friendly underwater networks and systems
• Field trials and experimental results for underwater networks and systems

Dr. Zheng Peng
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All submissions that pass pre-check are peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a single-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Journal of Sensor and Actuator Networks is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 2000 CHF (Swiss Francs). Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.