CSR-EHS:Architecture and Design Tools for Software Defined Acoustic Modem

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The aquatic research community is rapidly equipping ecological sites with a broad range of sensors and instruments. However, the development of aquatic sensing networks is significantly lagging terrestrial counterparts. It is widely recognized that an aquatic counterpart to low cost, low power, wireless radios is needed to advance the state-of-the-art in underwater sensor networks. Unfortunately, there are few open-architecture, low power and low cost underwater acoustic modems. This project looks at an alternative hardware platform for wireless underwater communication. Reconfigurable devices will be used to create a software defined acoustic modem (SDAM) ? the underwater counterpart to software defined radios being proposed for future generations of terrestrial communications. The SDAM can be remotely programmed, which enables adaptive sensing capabilities and changes to the network without physically retrieving the device. Since the communication protocol is programmed into the modem, the same SDAM board can be used for a variety of different underwater environments. The ultimate goal is to develop a prototype SDAM that uses a reconfigurable device for physical layer processing. This requires careful design of a system architecture that can communicate with the sensors, interface with acoustic transducer(s), efficiently compute physical layer algorithms, and provide services to the rest of the network stack. The broader impacts of this project center around the incorporation of embedded and reconfigurable computing systems into course material, and the use of the SDAM for ecological research, which enables long-term understanding of many ecological processes, including the effects of environmental degradation and climate change on coastal and lake ecosystems.