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Underwater exploration activities have grown significantly due to the proliferation of underwater Internet of Things (UIoT). However, to transmit sensor data from UIoT to remote onshore data processing center requires a huge cost of deploying and maintaining communication infrastructures. In this article, we propose an unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)-assisted underwater data acquisition scheme by placing multiple sink nodes on the water surface to serve as intermediate relays between underwater sensors (IoT nodes) and UAVs. In our scheme, the sensor data are first transmitted via an acoustic-signal link to a buoyant sink node, which then forwards the data to a UAV via an electromagnetic link. In particular, we adopt two sink-node-deployment methods, i.e., grid placement and random placement of sink nodes. Since the path connectivity from an underwater sensor node to the UAV is crucial to guarantee …