Research challenges and applications for underwater sensor networking

This paper explores applications and challenges for underwater sensor networks. We highlight potential applications to off-shore oilfields for seismic monitoring, equipment monitoring, and underwater robotics. We identify research directions in short-range acoustic communications, MAC, time synchronization, and localization protocols for high-latency acoustic networks, long-duration network sleeping, and application-level data scheduling. We describe our preliminary design on short-range acoustic communication hardware, and summarize results of high-latency time synchronization