Smart Plankton: a new generation of underwater wireless sensor networks

Description

The aquatic world, which covers more than the 70% of the earth, has been largely unaffected by the WSN revolution (ignited by DARPA funded UC Berkeley "Smart Dust" project) due to the difficulty of transferring most of the knowhow, developed for terrestrial and aerial systems and devices, to their underwater counterparts. Nowadays underwater wireless networks are expensive (US$ 10k or more), sparsely deployed (a few nodes, placed kilometers apart), typically communicating directly to a base-station or sometimes based on the use of underwater manned or unmanned vehicles. Our research is aimed to develop a new generation of UWSN (Underwater Wireless Sensor Network), called Smart Plankton, by getting inspiration from marine biology and aquatic micro-organism such as zooplankton and phytoplankton. Our target is to develop a self-organizing network composed by a relatively large number of innovative nodes, equipped with sensors for monitoring, surveillance, underwater control and many others potential applications.

Additional details