UComms: A Conference and Workshop on Underwater Communications, Channel Modeling, and Validation

This special issues presents some of the work brought to a conference on underwater communication held in 2012 with the aim to present a snapshot of the state of the art in UW communication technologies, both acoustic and optical, and to set the stage for agreeing on some benchmark problems and models that can be used to equitably evaluate different coding schemes and protocols. The conference was followed by a workshop that attempted to create a roadmap for future channel modeling and standardization. This guest editorial presents an introduction to the conference papers you find in this issue, together with the consensus distilled out of the workshop discussions.