A drift-tolerant model for data management in ocean sensor networks

  • Authors:
  • Silvia Nittel;Niki Trigoni;Konstantinos Ferentinos;Francois Neville;Arda Nural;Neal Pettigrew

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Maine;University of Oxford;Agricultural University of Athens;University of Maine;University of Maine;University of Maine

  • Venue:
  • MobiDE '07 Proceedings of the 6th ACM international workshop on Data engineering for wireless and mobile access
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

Traditional means of observing the ocean, like fixed mooring stations and radar systems, are difficult and expensive to deploy and provide coarse-grained and data measurements of currents and waves. In this paper, we explore the use of inexpensive wireless drifters as an alternative flexible infrastructure for fine-grained ocean monitoring. Surface drifters are designed specifically to move passively with the flow of water on the ocean surface and they are able to acquire sensor readings and GPS-generated positions at regular intervals. We view the fleet of drifters as a wireless ad-hoc sensor network with two types of nodes:i) a few powerful drifters with satellite connectivity, acting as mobile base-stations, and ii)a large number of low-power drifters with short-range acoustic or radio connectivity. Using real datasets from the Gulf of Maine (US) and the Liverpool Bay (UK), we study connectivity and uniformity properties of the ad-hoc mobile sensor network. We investigate the effect of deployment strategy, weather conditions as well as seasonal changes on the ability of drifters to relay readings to the end-users,and to provide sufficient sensing coverage of the monitored area. Our empirical study provides useful insights on how to design distributed routing and in-network processing algorithms tailored for ocean-monitoring sensor networks.