Aqua-Net

Overview

Recently, sensor network has emerged as a very powerful technique for many applications, including monitoring, measurement, surveillance and control. The idea of applying sensor networks into underwater environments has received increasing interests. The main research goal of Aqua-Net is an efficient and reliable framework for underwater sensor networks.

Advantages of Aqua-Net

Advanced design strategy

• User-friendly
• Cross-layer design
• Lowering “Narrow Waist”

Standard interfaces for developers

• Similar to Socket
• Highly portable & reusable
• Implemented in user space

Facilitating the implementation of protocols and applications

Design

Architecture

Aqua-Net consists of two parts: hardware platform and software platform, as shown in the figure below. The hardware platform includes the transducers, acoustic modem (Benthos Modem, OFDM Modem) and the Micro-controller realized by Gumstix. The software platform includes the embedded Linux operating system, network protocol stack and applications.

Micro-Controller

The Micro-controller is implemented on Gumstix, as shown in the reliance first capital figure below. The main features of Gumstix is as follows:

• Processor: XScale
• Speed: Up to 600MHZ
• Memory: Up to 128M RAM; Up to 32M Flash
• I/O Ports: Serial Port, USB Port, Audio Support, LCD Support, etc.
• Size: 80mm*20mm

Embedded Operating System

The embedded Linux is designed and optimized for embedded system. It is well supported by the open source community. Besides it is widely used in commercial products including mobile phone, game consoles and video cameras.

Protocol Stack

The protocol stack provides support for network protocols running on different layers, as shown in the figure below.

Case Study: UW-ALOHA

Experiment Setup

Topology

• One-hop network
• Multiple sources
• Single sink

Parameters

• Sending rate: 80 bps
• Frame size: 32 bytes

Testing scenarios

• increasing sending nodes -> increasing total traffic

Experiment Result

The experiment result is shown in the below figure. It shows that:

• Aqua-Net can be a useful tool to evaluate your work
• Aqua-Net can be used on real systems
• Our analysis on UW-ALOHA is close to the results tested with Aqua-Net

People

• Zheng Peng, Assistant Professor, Computer Science Department, City College, City University of New York
• Zhong Zhou, Microsoft
• Son Le, Google
• Haining Mo, Oracle
• Jun-Hong Cui, Professor, Computer Science & Technology, Jilin University
• Zhijie Shi, Computer Science & Engineering, University of Connecticut

Publications

• Aqua-Net: A New Testbed for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks,Zheng Peng, Zhong Zhou, Jun-Hong Cui, Zhijie Shi, IEEE/MTS OCEANS, 2009
• Aqua-Net: An Underwater Sensor Network Architecture -- Design and Implementation, Zheng Peng, Zhong Zhou, Jun-Hong Cui and Zhijie Shi, UCONN CSE Technical Report: UbiNet-TR08-03, September 2008
• R-MAC: An Energy-Efficient MAC Protocol for Underwater Sensor Networks, Peng Xie and Jun-Hong Cui, In Proceedings of International Conference on Wireless Algorithms, Systems, and Applications (WASA'07), Chicago, Illinois, USA, August 1-3 2007. A longer version is available as UCONN CSE Technical Report: UbiNet-TR06-06, December 2006
• Exploring Random Access and Handshaking Techniques in Large-Scale Underwater Wireless Acoustic Sensor Networks, Peng Xie and Jun-Hong Cui, In Proceedings of IEEE/MTS OCEANS'06, Boston, Massachusetts, USA, September 18-21, 2006.

Sponsor

This project is supported in part by the US National Science Foundation under CAREER Grant No. 0644190, Grant No. 0709005, Grant No. 0721834, Grant No. 0821597 and the US Office of Navy Research under YIP Grant No. N000140810864.