# Marine Internet for Internetworking in Oceans: A Tutorial
## 7 Conclusions  
The above discussion can be concluded with the following points. (i) At present, although there are many communication systems available as well as several new networking technologies under development, none of them alone can provide an effective solution for cost-effective network access in oceans due to huge size and hybrid as well as complexity of the networking environment in oceans. This environment is mainly composed of coastline network, water surface networks, underwater networks and networks above water surface. (ii) In this case, the best solution should be able to maximize exploiting any communication and networking resources available in oceans, which is the principle of marine Internet and termed as best-effort networking here. (iii) The network structure for marine Internet is large-scale cooperative heterogeneous and dynamic wireless networks, while the coastline network and the network above water surface can constitute a backbone network to efficiently support marine Internet users in water area near the coastline, where the majority of human activities in ocean take place. (iv) Underwater internetworking can be supported by the above backbone network, through which, underwater networks can connect not only with each other but with also terrestrial Internet.  
We believe that marine Internet will become more and more important to support and expand human activities in oceans. To foster its development, more studies are necessary to address the challenging issues discussed in Section 6 with the following research objectives.  
* We need to study and develop an end-to-end platform unified to all applications, while this platform can run over different types of networking units in marine Internet, such as various types of wireless nodes and sub-networks/systems. Different from the TCP/IP system used by the terrestrial Internet where wireless links are mainly used as last miles of the end-to-end connection, in marine Internet, many links of an end-to-end network connection may be wireless with different communication capacity, reliability and media.
* It is also necessary to study and develop a link management and neighbor discovery system to efficiently discover, locate and exploit all possible types of communication resources available in occans. This system is important for marine Internet to provide cost-effective networking services in real-time to deal with high dynamic link status in oceans with acceptable networking reliability.
* Due to high and real-time dynamic networking environments in oceans in terms of network topologies, link capacities and reliability as well as availability of energy sources, channel security level, etc., a networking unit should be able to make real-time decisions on link and route selection to satisfy application requirements cost-effectively as much as possible. To this end, it is necessary and interesting to study how artificial intelligence can be used to improve the performance of networking units for decision-making.  
This research was funded by The National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) grant number 61472237 and The National Natural Science Foundation of China-Guangdong Joint Fund grant number U1701265, respectively.  
The author declares no conflict of interest.