Collaborative Research NeTS-NOSS: SEA-Swarm: A Rapidly Deployable Underwater Sensor Network

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This project aims at defining, optimizing and implementing a novel underwater sensor network architecture, called SEA-Swarm (Sensor Equipped Aquatic Swarm), that consists of a large number of low cost underwater sensors that operate and move as a group (swarm) with water current and dispersion. The proposed SEA-Swarm architecture will enable a whole new era of observations, monitoring and explorations in the aqueous environment. Such tool will be by its very essence multidisciplinary and is expected to foster a broad collaboration between researchers in networking and communications and other scientific communities, such as environmental sciences, marine biology and coastal surveillance and security. A number of technological challenges shall be addressed by this project, along with the related fundamental research aspects: a new generation of underwater acoustic communications modems is to be designed based on OFDM, achieving unprecedented data rates thanks to Doppler compensation and MIMO space-time signal processing techniques. Cooperative communication protocols, driven by the information theoretic relay channel, are synergistically optimized jointly with a new energy efficient geo-routing algorithm. In essence, all the nodes in a virtual pipe from source to destination cooperate to reliably deliver the message. For reliable data transport, network coding for erasure correction and packet combining for energy efficiency is investigated. Finally, efficient localization schemes based on underwater GPS and nodes with dedicated data-collection functions (data mules) are advocated in order to tackle the mobility and the topology randomness problems due to the swarm nature of the network. The cross-layer design involving the above aspects is validated through a dedicated simulation environment (Aqua-Sim). A cost-effective over-the-water acoustic communication testbed shall be developed by USC in order to provide proof of concept of the basic network algorithms. Finally, an underwater testbed proof of concept is planned in synergy with other existing projects such as MyPond and MySound at U-Conn, and at the UCLA Marina Aquatic Center. The theoretical and experimental work at all three collaborating teams shall involve graduate students and also expose undergraduate students to state-of-the art communication engineering projects, developed in the framework of the above mentioned testbeds.