Abstract:Underwater acoustic (UWA) communications and networks play important role in the field of marine object localization and navigation, resources exploration and mining, environment sensing and monitoring, et al. And UWA channel modeling and simulation is the basis for building UWA communication and networks. Therefore, in this paper, the characteristics of channel propagation have been investigated, and accordingly the challenges of designing the UWA networks have been discussed. Then some channel modeling methods have been compared, including empirical model, acoustic field model, multipath channel model with intrinsic path, time-varying channel model with statistics features, and the simulation results have shown that the channel variation will downgrade the performance of signal receiving. And then some networking simulation tools and methods based on underwater UWA characteristics have been discussed, and their advantages and disadvantages were explored. Finally, it summarizes and looks forward to the future development directions of UWA channel modeling and simulation for UWA communication and networks.