SNUSE: Sensor Networks for Undersea Seismic Experimentation

Summary People Publications Software Related Links

Project Summary

Sensor networks---collections of small, intelligent, communicating devices that are deployed in the physical world and sense their surroundings---are just now being fielded, addressing problems in domains from science, government, military, and industry. A great deal of activity today considers radio-based sensor network design, from hardware, networking, sensing, programming, to applications. Compared to land-based sensors, undersea use of sensors has been quite limited, focused primarily on large, fixed, and wired devices.

This prject investigates the development of undersea sensor networks. The research is grounded in the application of seismic monitoring in the context of oil field exploitation. This application motivates three research directions:

Development of small, low-power, moderate-range acoustic telemetry for underwater sensor nodes. Radio-frequency absorption of water renders RF unsuitable, and current COTS acoustic modems are unacceptable for moderate-range communication between numerous sensors.
Adaptation of sensor networking to high-delay acoustic communication. The RF-based sensor networking community has come to depend on time synchronization, localization, and energy-efficient MAC protocols, all designed assuming nearly instantaneous neighbor-to-neighbor propagation times. Acoustic transmission is five orders of magnitude slower than RF, requiring reevaluation of these protocols and new design approaches.
Development of applications protocols for ultra-low duty cycle operation. Seismic applications will require ultra-low duty cycle operation to cope with long on and off periods.

Although we propose to explore these research goals in the context of undersea sensors and this specific application, we believe the work will be applicable to other undersea applications, and aspects of the work (ultra-low duty cycle operation) will be applicable to RF-based terrestrial sensor networks.

SNUSE is a project at USC/ISI funded by the NSF NeTS-NOSS-0435517, ``Sensor Networks for Undersea Seismic Experimentation'', and related work is funded by Chevron-Texaco via USC CiSoft.

People

(listed alphabetically)

John Heidemann (PI), Email:[email protected]
Yuan Li, Email:[email protected]
Affan A Syed, Email:[email protected]
Jack Wills (co-PI), Email:[email protected]
Wei Ye, (co-PI) Email:[email protected]

Publications and Presentations

Affan A. Syed, John Heidemann and Wei Ye." Tones for Real: Managing Multipath in Underwater Acoustic Wakeup." USC/ISI Technical Report ISI-TR-659.

Affan A. Syed, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann." Comparison and Evaluation of the T-Lohi MAC for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks." IEEE Journal of Selected Areas in Communication, V. 26 (N. 12), December, 2008.

Affan A. Syed, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. "T-Lohi: A New Class of MAC Protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks", Proceedings of IEEE INFOCOM 2008, Phoenix, AZ, USA. Pages 231-235, April 13-18 2008. A more extended version is available as a technical report ISI-TR-638, USC/Information Sciences Institute, April , 2007.
Affan Syed, Wei Ye, Bhaskar Krishnamachari, John Heidemann "Understanding spatio-temporal uncertainty in medium access with ALOHA protocols", in Proceedings of the Second ACM International Workshop on Underwater Networks (WUWNet). Montreal, Quebec, Canada, September 2007.

Affan A. Syed, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. "T-Lohi: A New Class of MAC Protocols for Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks" available Technical Report ISI-TR-638b, USC/Information Sciences Institute, July, 2007.

Wei Ye. Underwater Sensor Networks: Applications, Challenges and Techniques [PDF]. Seminar at Colorado School of Mines, Nov. 03, 2006.

Wei Ye, Fabio Silva, and John Heidemann. Ultra-Low Duty Cycle MAC with Scheduled Channel Polling [PDF]. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SenSys Conference , Boulder, Colorado, USA, November, 2006.
An earlier version is available as a Technical Report, ISI-TR-604, USC Information Sciences Institute, July 2005.

Yuan Li, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. Energy Efficient Network Reconfiguration for Mostly-Off Sensor Networks. In Proceedings of the Third IEEE Conference on Sensor and Adhoc Communication and Networks , p. to appear. Reston, Virginia, USA, IEEE. September, 2006. [pdf]
Fred Stann, John Heidemann, Rajesh Shroff, and Muhammad Zaki Murtaza. RBP: Robust Broadcast Propagation in Wireless Networks. In Proceedings of the Fourth ACM SenSys Conference , p. to appear. Boulder, Colorado, USA, ACM. November, 2006. [pdf].

Affan Syed, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. Medium Access in Underwater Acoustic Sensor Networks [PDF], available as ISI Tech report ISI-TR-624, Oct 2006. Also presented as a work-in-progress poster at the first WUWNet Workshop in September 2006, at Marina del Rey, CA.

Jack Wills, Wei Ye, and John Heidemann. Low-Power Acoustic Modem for Dense Underwater Sensor Networks [PDF]. In Proceedings of the First ACM International Workshop on UnderWater Networks (WUWNet) , p. 79-85. Los Angeles, California, USA, ACM. September, 2006.

Yuan Li, Wei Ye and John Heidemann. Energy Efficient Network Reconfiguration for Mostly-Off Sensor Networks [PDF]. Proceedings of the Third IEEE Conference on Sensor and Ad hoc Communication and Networks (SECON), Reston, VA, USA, September, 2006.

Affan Syed and John Heidemann. Time Synchronization for High Latency Acoustic Networks. [pdf].Proceedings of INFOCOM 2006, Barcelona, Spain. April 25-28, 2006.

John Heidemann, Wei Ye, Jack Wills, Affan Syed, Yuan Li. Research Challenges and Applications for Underwater Sensor Networking [pdf]. . In Proceedings of the IEEE Wireless Communications and Networking Conference, p. to appear. Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, IEEE. April, 2006. (Originally released as USC-ISI Technical Report ISI-TR-2005-603, USC Information Sciences Institute, July, 2005.)

Affan A. Syed and John Heidemann. Time Synchronization for High Latency Acoustic Networks [pdf]. Technical Report ISI-TR-2005-602, USC Information Sciences Institute. April 2005. This is an extended version of the INFOCOM paper

Wei Ye. Presentation slides at the NSF NOSS PI meeting [PDF]. Oct., 2004.

For related publications, please see the I-LENSE publications web page.

Software

See the I-LENSE software distribution web page.