The SEANet Project: Toward a Programmable Internet of Underwater Things

Wirelessly networked systems of underwater devices are becoming the basis of many commercial, scientific, and military applications. In spite of increased attention in the last few years, underwater wireless networking technology still suffers from major limitations, including severe hardware dependence. In this paper, we introduce the SEANet Project, an NSF-funded effort that aims at developing a new generation of programmable platforms and a networking testbed to enable the vision of a programmable Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT). SEANet will be based on new software-defined platforms based on an open architecture to enable the flexibility to define, add, update, and swap new components in both hardware and software. SEANet is designed to support data rates at least one order of magnitude higher than existing commercial platforms over short and moderate range links. Moreover, the SEANet project will explore the design of new custom-designed ultra-wide band Microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) transducers that allow operating over much wider acoustic bandwidth (i.e., 0.01.-2 MHz) than possible with bulk piezoelectric transducers. We present a set of preliminary experiments showing that SEANet can outperform existing software-defined radio SDR-based acoustic modems based on a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) SDR platforms. We also demonstrate the real-time reconfiguration capability of SEANet and preliminary performance of the MEMS transducers.