An Underwater Sensor Network with Dual Communications, Sensing, and Mobility

This paper describes an underwater sensor network with dual communication and support for sensing and mobility. The nodes in the system are connected acoustically for broadcast communication using an acoustic modem we developed. The nodes are connected optically for higher speed point to point data transfers using an optical modem we developed. We describe the hardware details of the underwater sensor node and the communication and networking protocols. Finally, we present and discuss the results from experiments with this system.