Abstract: Underwater sensor networks are physical networks containing acoustic,magnetic,and static electric field.It has got widely application in ocean data acquisition,pollution forecasting,ocean exploitation,and ocean supervision.And in future it will show its advantages in the battlefield.The state-of-the-art underwater wireless sensor networks are overviewed,and several typical structures of underwater wireless sensor networks are also described.Taking account of the requirements of underwater applications several fundamental key aspects in the design of underwater sensor networks,such as node localization,energy,source localization and other challenges are investigated.Finally open issues in underwater sensor networks are discussed.