title: A hierarchical communication architecture for oceanic surveillance applications.
abstract: The interest in monitoring applications using underwater sensor networks has been growing in recent years. The severe communication restrictions imposed by underwater channels make that efficient monitoring be a challenging task. Though a lot of research has been conducted on underwater sensor networks, there are only few concrete applications to a real-world case study. In this work, hence, we propose a general three tier architecture leveraging low cost wireless technologies for acoustic communications between underwater sensors and standard technologies, Zigbee and Wireless Fidelity (WiFi), for water surface communications. We have selected a suitable Medium Access Control (MAC) layer, after making a comparison with some common MAC protocols. Thus the performance of the overall system in terms of Signals Discarding Rate (SDR), signalling delay at the surface gateway as well as the percentage of true detection have been evaluated by simulation, pointing out good results which give evidence in applicability's favour.
authors.affiliation: Grupo de Arquitectura y Concurrencia, Departamento de Ingeniería Telemática, Universidad de Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Campus Universitario de Tafira, 35017 Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Gran Canaria, Spain. emacias@dit.ulpgc.es
authors.forename: Elsa
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Macias
authors.forename: Alvaro
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Suarez
authors.forename: Francesco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Chiti
authors.forename: Andrea
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Sacco
authors.forename: Romano
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Fantacci
mesh_terms: D004784:Environmental Monitoring / Q000379:methods*; D009792:Oceans and Seas