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With the fast growing demand for underwater applications such as marine environmental monitoring, undersea resource exploration, disaster prevention and monitoring, assisted localization and navigation, and security monitoring, the IoUT is proposed to enable a new network framework to connect underwater smart things in rivers and oceans. Conventional UWSNs are perceived as the fundamental infrastructure of IoUT. However, the high cost of underwater devices, high energy consumption of data aggregation, and low localization accuracy limit their further development. AUV brings the mobility property into network designs, which improves localization accuracy, data transmission rate, and data aggregation efficiency. However, it also brings new challenges for localization, path planning and coordination of AUVs. In this article, we briefly introduce the architecture of AUV-aided UWSNs and summarize their advantages based on the current research. Several significant issues when designing localization algorithms and coordination schemes for AUV-aided UWSNs are investigated in detail. We also analyze the main challenges under different scenarios such as the interaction between AUV and sensor nodes and communications among multiple AUVs. Based on these discussions, we conclude the article with the future research directions of AUV-aided UWSNs.
Su et al. (Mon,) studied this question.