Research challenges and applications for underwater sensor networking
03 Apr 2006-Vol. 1, pp 228-235
TL;DR: This paper identifies research directions in short-range acoustic communications, MAC, time synchronization, and localization protocols for high-latency acoustic networks, long-duration network sleeping, and application-level data scheduling for underwater sensor networks.
Abstract: This paper explores applications and challenges for underwater sensor networks. We highlight potential applications to off-shore oilfields for seismic monitoring, equipment monitoring, and underwater robotics. We identify research directions in short-range acoustic communications, MAC, time synchronization, and localization protocols for high-latency acoustic networks, long-duration network sleeping, and application-level data scheduling. We describe our preliminary design on short-range acoustic communication hardware, and summarize results of high-latency time synchronization
Citations
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TL;DR: A detailed exploration of the single-copy routing space is performed in order to identify efficient single- copy solutions that can be employed when low resource usage is critical, and can help improve the design of general routing schemes that use multiple copies.
Abstract: Intermittently connected mobile networks are wireless networks where most of the time there does not exist a complete path from the source to the destination. There are many real networks that follow this model, for example, wildlife tracking sensor networks, military networks, vehicular ad hoc networks, etc. In this context, conventional routing schemes fail, because they try to establish complete end-to-end paths, before any data is sent. To deal with such networks researchers have suggested to use flooding-based routing schemes. While flooding-based schemes have a high probability of delivery, they waste a lot of energy and suffer from severe contention which can significantly degrade their performance. Furthermore, proposed efforts to reduce the overhead of flooding-based schemes have often been plagued by large delays. With this in mind, we introduce a new family of routing schemes that "spray" a few message copies into the network, and then route each copy independently towards the destination. We show that, if carefully designed, spray routing not only performs significantly fewer transmissions per message, but also has lower average delivery delays than existing schemes; furthermore, it is highly scalable and retains good performance under a large range of scenarios. Finally, we use our theoretical framework proposed in our 2004 paper to analyze the performance of spray routing. We also use this theory to show how to choose the number of copies to be sprayed and how to optimally distribute these copies to relays.
1,162 citations
Cites background from "Research challenges and application..."
...Finally, deep space networks [6] and underwater networks [7] often have to deal with long propagation delays and/or intermittent connectivity, as well....
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TL;DR: This survey gives an overview of wireless sensor networks and their application domains including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further and identifies several open research issues that need to be investigated in future.
Abstract: Wireless sensor network (WSN) has emerged as one of the most promising technologies for the future. This has been enabled by advances in technology and availability of small, inexpensive, and smart sensors resulting in cost effective and easily deployable WSNs. However, researchers must address a variety of challenges to facilitate the widespread deployment of WSN technology in real-world domains. In this survey, we give an overview of wireless sensor networks and their application domains including the challenges that should be addressed in order to push the technology further. Then we review the recent technologies and testbeds for WSNs. Finally, we identify several open research issues that need to be investigated in future.
Our survey is different from existing surveys in that we focus on recent developments in wireless sensor network technologies. We review the leading research projects, standards and technologies, and platforms. Moreover, we highlight a recent phenomenon in WSN research that is to explore synergy between sensor networks and other technologies and explain how this can help sensor networks achieve their full potential. This paper intends to help new researchers entering the domain of WSNs by providing a comprehensive survey on recent developments.
922 citations
TL;DR: Key applications and the main phenomena related to acoustic propagation are summarized, and how they affect the design and operation of communication systems and networking protocols at various layers are discussed.
Abstract: This paper examines the main approaches and challenges in the design and implementation of underwater wireless sensor networks. We summarize key applications and the main phenomena related to acoustic propagation, and discuss how they affect the design and operation of communication systems and networking protocols at various layers. We also provide an overview of communications hardware, testbeds and simulation tools available to the research community.
728 citations
Cites background or methods from "Research challenges and application..."
...Seaweb (Proakis et al., 2001) is an early example of a large deployable network for potential military applications....
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...For example, the Seaweb deployment in 2000 involved 17 nodes spread over a 16 km2 area with a median of 5 neighbors per node (Proakis et al., 2001)....
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...For example, due to acoustic modem limitations, FDMA was chosen for the early deployment of SeaWeb (Proakis et al., 2001), even though the use of guard bands for channel separation leads to some inefficiency and this type of frequency channel allocation has very little flexibility (e.g., to accommodate varying transmission rates)....
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...They have been extensively used in SeaWeb (Proakis et al., 2001), with vendor-supported modifications, but their firmware is not accessible to general users, limiting their use for new PHY and MAC research....
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...Seaweb represents one of the first multi-hop networks, deploying more than a dozen nodes off San Diego in 2000 (Proakis et al., 2001)....
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05 May 2008
TL;DR: A depth-based routing (DBR) protocol that can take advantage of a multiple-sink underwater sensor network architecture without introducing extra cost and can achieve very high packet delivery ratios for dense networks with only small communication cost is proposed.
Abstract: Providing scalable and efficient routing services in underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) is very challenging due to the unique characteristics of UWSNs. Firstly, UWSNs often employ acoustic channels for communications because radio signals do not work well in water. Compared with radio-frequency channels, acoustic channels feature much lower bandwidths and several orders of magnitudes longer propagation delays. Secondly, UWSNs usually have very dynamic topology as sensors move passively with water currents. Some routing protocols have been proposed to address the challenging problem in UWSNs. However, most of them assume that the full-dimensional location information of all sensor nodes in a network is known in prior through a localization process, which is yet another challenging issue to be solved in UWSNs. In this paper, we propose a depth-based routing (DBR) protocol. DBR does not require full-dimensional location information of sensor nodes. Instead, it needs only local depth information, which can be easily obtained with an inexpensive depth sensor that can be equipped in every underwater sensor node. A key advantage of our protocol is that it can handle network dynamics efficiently without the assistance of a localization service. Moreover, our routing protocol can take advantage of a multiple-sink underwater sensor network architecture without introducing extra cost. We conduct extensive simulations. The results show that DBR can achieve very high packet delivery ratios (at least 95%) for dense networks with only small communication cost.
652 citations
Additional excerpts
..., building underwater sensor networks (UWSNs) [1] [4] [6] [13] [14] [16]....
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TL;DR: The authors aim to provide an overview, spanning this decade, of key underwater networking protocol and point-to-point communication technique developments.
Abstract: There has been a growing interest in underwater acoustic communications over the past 30 years because of its defense, offshore oil industry, marine commercial operations, oceanography, and marine research applications. As compared to initial communication systems, improved performance and robustness have resulted from continued research over the years. The authors aim to provide an overview, spanning this decade, of key underwater networking protocol and point-to-point communication technique developments. Insight into some of the open challenges and problems researchers in this field will face in the near future is also provided by the authors.
585 citations
Cites background from "Research challenges and application..."
...MACA-based protocols are found to be highly suited in many scenarios underwater where scalability is important and time-synchronization is not available (Kebkal et al., 2005; Heidemann et al., 2006; Molins and Stojanovic, 2006; Xie and Cui, 2006)....
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...Thus it is often proposed that media access control (MAC) protocols for underwater networks be developed ground up and not directly adopt existing terrestrial protocols (Jiejun et al., 2005; Heidemann et al., 2006)....
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References
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01 Nov 1985
TL;DR: This month's guest columnist, Steve Bible, N7HPR, is completing a master’s degree in computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California, and his research area closely follows his interest in amateur radio.
Abstract: Spread Spectrum It’s not just for breakfast anymore! Don't blame me, the title is the work of this month's guest columnist, Steve Bible, N7HPR (n7hpr@tapr.org). While cruising the net recently, I noticed a sudden bump in the number of times Spread Spectrum (SS) techniques were mentioned in the amateur digital areas. While QEX has discussed SS in the past, we haven't touched on it in this forum. Steve was a frequent cogent contributor, so I asked him to give us some background. Steve enlisted in the Navy in 1977 and became a Data Systems Technician, a repairman of shipboard computer systems. In 1985 he was accepted into the Navy’s Enlisted Commissioning Program and attended the University of Utah where he studied computer science. Upon graduation in 1988 he was commissioned an Ensign and entered Nuclear Power School. His subsequent assignment was onboard the USS Georgia, a trident submarine stationed in Bangor, Washington. Today Steve is a Lieutenant and he is completing a master’s degree in computer science at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. His areas of interest are digital communications, amateur satellites, VHF/UHF contesting, and QRP. His research area closely follows his interest in amateur radio. His thesis topic is Multihop Packet Radio Routing Protocol Using Dynamic Power Control. Steve is also the AMSAT Area Coordinator for the Monterey Bay area. Here's Steve, I'll have some additional comments at the end.
8,781 citations
"Research challenges and application..." refers background in this paper
...Short-term equipment monitoring shares many requirements of long-term seismic monitoring, including the need for wireless (acoustic) communication, automatic configuration into a multihop network, localization (and hence time synchronization), and energy efficient operation....
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Journal Article•
TL;DR: S-MAC as discussed by the authors is a medium access control protocol designed for wireless sensor networks, which uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration, including virtual clusters to auto-sync on sleep schedules.
Abstract: This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks. Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices. A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring. We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected. These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 802.11 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important. S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration. To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep. Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules. Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes. Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling. Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data move through the network. We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley. The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 802.11-like MAC consumes 2–6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1–10s.
5,354 citations
07 Nov 2002
TL;DR: S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration, and applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data move through the network.
Abstract: This paper proposes S-MAC, a medium-access control (MAC) protocol designed for wireless sensor networks Wireless sensor networks use battery-operated computing and sensing devices A network of these devices will collaborate for a common application such as environmental monitoring We expect sensor networks to be deployed in an ad hoc fashion, with individual nodes remaining largely inactive for long periods of time, but then becoming suddenly active when something is detected These characteristics of sensor networks and applications motivate a MAC that is different from traditional wireless MACs such as IEEE 80211 in almost every way: energy conservation and self-configuration are primary goals, while per-node fairness and latency are less important S-MAC uses three novel techniques to reduce energy consumption and support self-configuration To reduce energy consumption in listening to an idle channel, nodes periodically sleep Neighboring nodes form virtual clusters to auto-synchronize on sleep schedules Inspired by PAMAS, S-MAC also sets the radio to sleep during transmissions of other nodes Unlike PAMAS, it only uses in-channel signaling Finally, S-MAC applies message passing to reduce contention latency for sensor-network applications that require store-and-forward processing as data move through the network We evaluate our implementation of S-MAC over a sample sensor node, the Mote, developed at University of California, Berkeley The experiment results show that, on a source node, an 80211-like MAC consumes 2-6 times more energy than S-MAC for traffic load with messages sent every 1-10 s
5,117 citations
"Research challenges and application..." refers background in this paper
...233...
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...Finally, unlike terrestrial networks, underwater sensor networks cannot take advantage of rich existing infrastructure such as GPS....
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28 Sep 2002
TL;DR: An in-depth study of applying wireless sensor networks to real-world habitat monitoring and an instance of the architecture for monitoring seabird nesting environment and behavior is presented.
Abstract: We provide an in-depth study of applying wireless sensor networks to real-world habitat monitoring. A set of system design requirements are developed that cover the hardware design of the nodes, the design of the sensor network, and the capabilities for remote data access and management. A system architecture is proposed to address these requirements for habitat monitoring in general, and an instance of the architecture for monitoring seabird nesting environment and behavior is presented. The currently deployed network consists of 32 nodes on a small island off the coast of Maine streaming useful live data onto the web. The application-driven design exercise serves to identify important areas of further work in data sampling, communications, network retasking, and health monitoring.
4,623 citations