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AbstractThis paper provides an overview of the CLAM equipment from which data can be collected or transmitted.
project, which aims at developing a collaborative embedded In addition very costly point-to-point communications may
monitoring and control platform for submarine surveillance by be required. In short, existing underwater monitoring systems
combining cutting edge acoustic vector sensor technology and
1D, 2D, 3D sensor arrays, underwater wireless sensor networks have numerous drawbacks such as:
protocol design, advanced techniques for acoustic communica-
tion, new solutions for collaborative situation-aware reasoning Coarse-grained data measurements: most present-day un-
and distributed data and signal processing and control for derwater sensing systems are deployed very sparsely. The
horizontal and vertical sensor arrays. The result will be a coarse-grained measurements obtained therefore do not
new system architecture accommodating pervasively distributed
heterogeneous sensor nodes deployed at different water depths, reflect the phenomenal changes accurately. This hinders
which provides a flexible, reconfigurable, and robust platform for efforts to fully understand the dynamics of the underwater
online surveillance of submarine environments. Horizontal and environment.
vertical collaboration between sensor arrays by means of beam Inadequacy of point-to-point communication links: oper-
forming, sensor fusion and distributed processing and reasoning ating in an insufficient data rate acoustic channels and in a
enables fine-grained monitoring of the submarine environment
and collaborative event detection as well as transmission of the single-hop network is a normal practice in existing under-
network information to the monitoring stations such as buoys water monitoring systems. This, however, is not adequate
and AUVs. for underwater monitoring applications where higher data
rates over considerably longer distances are required to
I. I NTRODUCTION deliver the necessary communications capabilities.
Recently there has been a significantly increased need for Frequency dependent attenuation and refraction of the
underwater communication systems with high data rates over acoustic signal cause shadow zones, which pose problems
considerably longer distances for military, security, and civil- to reliable communication.
ian applications including fields of energy production (oil, gas Lack of low-power acoustic sensors and transmitters for
extraction), energy distribution (e.g., oil plants, oil transport, underwater: current underwater monitoring systems have
seaport monitoring), and monitoring wellbeing of marine life. high power transmitters, which need large size battery
Products claiming to meet these needs are appearing, but are packs. The frequent battery shifts also greatly contribute
still not technically mature. In what follows, we highlight making widespread deployment of the current underwater
challenges faced by current underwater monitoring systems. monitoring systems difficult.
Inadequacy of current networking protocols: to sense and
A. Challenges of underwater monitoring monitor submarine environments, sensor nodes should be
Monitoring the underwater world is a challenging task due deployed in 3D and their location is usually controlled
to its complexity, size and extreme harshness, and due to the (as nodes are attached to buoys and float at different
limited technology we can count on today. Current state-of- controllable depths, or are anchored to the seafloor).
the-art in underwater technology includes acoustic modems as Given their higher cost and the higher size of the areas
well as sensors and autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs). over which they are deployed, underwater sensor nodes
Individually, these technologies are mature enough to justify tend to be much sparser than in wireless sensor networks
the idea of their integration into an underwater communication deployed on land. This demands a careful 3D topology
network. However, current monitoring solutions suffer from control planning to enable node connectivity on the one
costly and difficult installations and sometimes dangerous hand and to optimise placement for better performance
operations. Once installed, collecting the data from the un- on the other hand.
derwater sensing systems is by no means simple. Long cables Lack of suitable heterogeneity supports for the different
may be needed to connect underwater sensors to sea-surface devices involved, including sensor nodes and AUVs.