Collaborative Research:CI-ADDO-NEW: Ocean-TUNE: A Community Ocean Testbed for Underwater Wireless Networks

National Science Foundation (Award No. 1205726, 1205665, 1205757, 1205725)

06/01/2012 -- 05/31/2015

Project Summary

There is growing global importance of ocean exploration and monitoring as the oceans play a major role in climate regulation, nutrient production, resource retrieval and transportation, etc. Building and deploying a real-time underwater networked sensing infrastructure is thus needed for desired levels of monitoring and data collection. Despite a wave of research efforts in the area of underwater wireless networks, the lack of a community testbed has so far hampered further advances, as there is no common platform to evaluate and compare various communication and networking algorithms and protocols. Furthermore very few studies can afford to consider real system features due to the high cost of system deployment and maintenance.

This project involves the design and deployment of an open underwater testbed suite, accessible to the public at four sites in Connecticut, California, Texas, and Washington States. The testbed will include flexible choices of surface nodes, bottom nodes, and mobile nodes with reconfigurable modems. It will enable the vision of remote controlled and continuous networked node deployments running tests of communication, networking, sensing, and data streaming. In addition, the testbed will enable oceanographers to study scientific research questions, while using the testbed as a prototype for larger real-time monitoring deployments elsewhere. The testbed will also directly impact undergraduate research and student diversity by involving undergraduate students through REU programs, impacting curriculum development by enabling field courses, and engaging K-12 students and teachers, particularly in underserved communities.

Project Participants

In this collaborative and interdisciplinary research, a group of investigators from four institutions with complementary expertise take active roles in this project. They carry out the proposed research activities collaboratively to realize the project goals. The members of the research team bring a unique and complementary qualifications to this research project, with recognized strength in the areas of underwater acoustic networks, scheduling and spectrum management, algorithm design and analysis, and underwater sound with marine animals.

Participating Institutions

• University of Connecticut (UConn)
• University of Washington (UW)
• University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA)
• Texas A&M University (TAMU)

Participating Faculty

• Jun-Hong Cui, UConn site PI
• James O'Donnell, UConn site Co-PI
• Shengli Zhou, UConn site Co-PI
• Zhijie Shi, UConn site Co-PI
• Zheng Peng, UConn site SP
• Sumit Roy, UW site PI
• Payman Arabshahi, UW site Co-PI
• Mario Gerla, UCLA site PI
• Xi Zhang, TAMU site PI