Performance of electromagnetic communication in underwater wireless sensor networks

Abstract

Underwater wireless sensor networks (WSNs) composed of a number of sensor nodes that are deployed to conduct a collaborative monitoring task. Wireless signals are used for communication between the sensor nodes. Acoustic signals are the dominant signals used as a wireless communication medium in underwater WSNs due to the relatively low absorption in the underwater environments. Acoustic signals face a lot of challenges such as ambient noise, manmade noise, limited bandwidth, multipath and low propagation speed. Some of these challenges become more severe in shallow water environment where a high level of ambient and mankind noise, turbidity and multipath propagation are available. Therefore, electromagnetic signals can be applied as an alternative communication signal for underwater WSNs in the shallow water. In this project, the performance of EM communication in underwater WSNs is investigated for the shallow water environment. Theoretical calculations and practical experiments are conducted in fresh and seawater. It is shown that signals propagate for longer ranges in freshwater comparing to seawater. Theoretical results show that attenuation of electromagnetic communication in seawater is much higher than in fresh water. The attenuation is increasing with the increasing of frequency. In addition, velocity of the signal is increasing as the frequency is increasing while loss tangent is decreasing as the frequency increasing. Based on practical experiments, freshwater medium permits short ranges EM communication that does not exceed 25.1 cm for 2.4 GHz frequency. On the other hand, communication in seawater is very difficult to achieve for the same high frequency. Path loss exponent was estimated for freshwater environment based on logdistance path loss model. The estimation was achieved through a comparison between theoretical calculations and practical measurements. The path loss exponent for EM communication in fresh water was estimated to be in the range of 2.3 to 2.4.