
As the rising of ocean economic and the deepgoing research of wireless sensor networks (WSN), underwater wireless sensor networks (UWSN) becomes hot spot recent years, which applies the technology of traditional terrestrial WSN into underwater environments. UWSN is a combination of underwater acoustic sensor nodes, autonomous underwater vehicles (AUV) and a above water base station which is connected to the terrestrial control center. UWSN has the great applying prospect such as data collection of ocean information, ocean monitoring, pollution and disaster early warning, salvage and martial applications. Data collected by sensor nodes and AUV is send to the base station by particular routing or navigation algorithms. There are significant differences between UWSN and traditional terrestrial WSN.The bandwidth, network throughput and channel quality of UWSN are seriously effected or decreased by the unique characteristics and rugged environment of underwater channel. Moreover, UWSN nodes are energy restricted and it is impractical for battery replacement in underwater applications, which brings a major challenge for the deployment of UWSN. Thus, the problem of energy saving and prolonging network lifetime becomes hot spot in UWSN researching. In this paper we introduced unique characteristics of UWSN, underwater channels and network architecture.