Underwater Communications

Overview

Underwater communication systems have drawn the attention of the research community for the past several years. This growing interest can largely be attributed to new civil and military applications enabled by large-scale networks of underwater devices (e.g., underwater static sensors, unmanned autonomous vehicles (AUVs), and autonomous robots), which can retrieve information from the aquatic and marine environment, perform in-network processing on the extracted data, and transmit the collected information to remote locations. However, progress in this research domain has been slow. The grand challenges relating to low throughput and long delays associated with acoustic communications have still not been solved.

With a view to accelerate research in underwater communication systems, the primary research objectives of this project include:

Exploring applicability of the THz band for underwater communications, through the use of innovative concepts such as Ultra-Massive MIMO and Dynamic Massive MIMO.

Design, implementation, and optimal operation of reconfigurable multi-frequency (RF-THz-Optical) front-ends that make use of electronic frequency up-conversion chains, and photonic frequency down-conversion chains.

Design and development of physically reconfigurable and electronically tunable multi-frequency antenna systems.

Design of Cube Underwater Systems (CubeUwats) with a focus on hardware and software standardization for rapid deployment.

Design of piezoelectric underwater energy harvesting systems.