A Real-Time Underwater Acoustic Telemetry Receiver With Edge Computing for Studying Fish Behavior and Environmental Sensing

Underwater acoustic telemetry has emerged as a powerful tool for practical applications, including resource exploration, environmental monitoring, and aquatic animal tracking. However, current acoustic telemetry systems lack the capability to transmit the collected data continuously in real time, primarily because the acoustic networking bandwidth is limited. Retrieval of the recorded measurements from the deployed receivers usually must be manual, leading to long delays in data retrieval and processing, high operational costs associated with the required manpower, and safety risks for the operators. In addition, there is no efficient way to continuously assess the status of the acoustic telemetry system, including the acoustic transmitters and receivers. Here, we describe the design, implementation, and field validation of a cloud-based, real-time, underwater acoustic telemetry system with edge computing for estimating fish behavior and monitoring environmental parameters. The system incorporates microcontrollers for edge computing and connects to a cloud-based service that further post-processes the transmitted data stream to derive behavior and survival information of tagged animals. The developed system has been demonstrated to have significantly improved performance over the benchmark system because of the integration of edge computing, with a greatly reduced energy consumption of 0.014 W resulting in the energy used by the acoustic modem being reduced by over 300 times. This work opens up new design opportunities for future real-time and multifunctional underwater acoustic systems.