Design and experimentation of a low-power IoT embedded system for wireless underwater sensing

This paper aims at presenting an experimented low power Internet of Things architecture, that could be integrated to underwater monitoring systems like Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for wireless underwater sensing. The proposed hardware architecture of the sensor nodes is based on an ultra-low-power Flash Micro-controller that takes measurements from water sensors, and synchronizes the network by means of a GPS. The receiver board incorporates a Digital Signal Processor and a Flash MCU that communicates data to a local server implemented on a RaspberryPI unit. Moreover, this paper proposes mechanisms to minimize the power consumption of the realized system. Laboratory experiments and sea trials have been conducted successfully with water depth and temperature sensors and showed the capability of the developed system to measure the real temperature and depth of the water and gather the measured data to the local server with the minimum power consumption.