Design, Development, and Testing of a Smart Buoy for Underwater Testbeds in Shallow Waters

Underwater wireless communication and networking are becoming key enablers of a number of critical marine and underwater applications. Experimentation is underway, in controlled environments as well as at sea, that concerns the deployment of several underwater devices providing wireless communication capabilities to sensors of different nature. Controlling the deployment at sea of these devices, remotely and efficiently, is paramount for enabling expedite testing of hardware and protocol development. To address this need, this paper presents the design, development, and testing of a Smart Buoy for real-time remote access to underwater devices and for provision of power and extended computational capabilities. Experimental results are shown concerning the time needed to connect with the Smart Buoy, the power consumption of its operations, and the energy harvesting intake (via solar panels) in time. We also investigate the buoy lifetime when powered by solar panels and supporting acoustic modems over varying traffic scenarios.