There is growing global importance of ocean exploration and monitoring as the oceans play a major role in climate regulation, nutrient production, resource retrieval and transportation, etc. Building and deploying a real-time underwater networked sensing infrastructure is thus needed for desired levels of monitoring and data collection. Despite a wave of research efforts in the area of underwater wireless networks, the lack of a community testbed has so far hampered further advances, as there is no common platform to evaluate and compare various communication and networking algorithms and protocols. Furthermore very few studies can afford to consider real system features due to the high cost of system deployment and maintenance.
This project involves the design and deployment of an open underwater testbed suite, accessible to the public at four sites in Connecticut, California, Texas, and Washington States. The testbed will include flexible choices of surface nodes, bottom nodes, and mobile nodes with reconfigurable modems. It will enable the vision of remote controlled and continuous networked node deployments running tests of communication, networking, sensing, and data streaming. In addition, the testbed will enable oceanographers to study scientific research questions, while using the testbed as a prototype for larger real-time monitoring deployments elsewhere. The testbed will also directly impact undergraduate research and student diversity by involving undergraduate students through REU programs, impacting curriculum development by enabling field courses, and engaging K-12 students and teachers, particularly in underserved communities.
