Software
Acoustic Modems for Short Range Mote-based Underwater Sensor Networks
Raja
Jurdak, Cristina Videira Lopes and Pierre Baldi
Abstract
Most recent work in underwater network
development has relied on using expensive commercial acoustic modems or on building
custom transceivers for each application to establish acoustic communication
links among the sensors. Using commercial modems or designing custom hardware
may require prohibitive monetary or time investment for many applications. Our
work proposes the design of software acoustic modems that can utilize built-in
microphones and speakers on the relatively cheap Tmote
Invent platforms. The built-in Tmote hardware and the
software modem enable acoustic communication in a short range shallow water
network. In this paper, we present the initial design and architecture of our
acoustic communication system which targets environmental monitoring
applications. Our experiments with generic acoustic hardware to profile this
underwater communication channel reveal that the channel favors frequencies
below 3Khz, a result which guides the design choices
for our FSK software modem. We perform experiments with our software
modem/generic hardware system to explore the system’s data transfer capability.
The data communications experiments confirm the system’s capability of
transferring information in the order of tens of bits per second for a
communications range of up to 10 meters.
In proceedings of
IEEE Oceans – Asia
Pacific.