The world of global energy markets is steadily expanding, fuelled by the immense growth in oil and gas exploration. Billions of dollars are spent in this industry for boosting production and managing facilities that are remote and inaccessible. The sinking of the Deepwater Horizon in April 2010, an offshore oil drilling rig, and the environmental disaster that followed sparked renewed interest in acoustic subsea technologies, such as underwater acoustic telemetry, networks and remotely operated vehicles (ROV). The impact of this calamity was huge and it did not only affect the oil and gas industry but it also affected immensely the marine wildlife and raised many questions on the reliability of the technologies currently being used in the subsea industry [1], [2]. Furthermore, recently software giants such as Microsoft have started experimenting with underwater data centers to deal with the required cooling costs of the rack servers for cloud computing [3]. Therefore, it is expected that underwater communications technologies will play a significant role in monitoring and maintaining underwater data centers for the years to come.

1. M. Gaskill, “Deepwater Horizon: one year on”, Nature, April 2011, doi:10.1038/news.2011.246.
2. J. Svanberg, “M2M Applications in the Oil and Gas Industry,”Berg Insight Report, 3rd Ed., 2015
3. Project Natick, http://natick.research.microsoft.com