Underwater optical wireless sensor network for real-time underwater environmental monitoring

With the growing number of underwater vehicles and devices used for marine environmental monitoring, there is an urgent need for real-time and high-speed underwater wireless communication technologies to transmit huge amounts of data. This poses great challenges to conventional underwater acoustic communication technology due to its low bandwidth and high latency. Therefore, underwater wireless optical communication with high bandwidth and low latency has become a promising technology. To this end, we develop the first underwater optical wireless sensor network prototype in this work. It consists of two sensor nodes and an optical hub. There is a transceiver circuit, a pH sensor, and an integrated temperature, salinity, and conductivity sensor in the sensor nodes enabling real-time underwater environmental monitoring. There are four transceivers facing four sides in the optical hub to implement bi-directional optical wireless communication with the sensor nodes. In a laboratory testbed and a field trial conducted in an outdoor diving pool, 100% packet success rates are achieved between the optical hub and the sensor nodes at a transmission distance of 60 cm. In the field trial, one of the sensor nodes is placed 60 cm away from the optical hub for real-time underwater environmental monitoring. The other sensor node is mounted on a remotely operated vehicle to collect underwater environmental information. This prototype shows great potential in future underwater mobile sensor networks and the underwater Internet of Things.