A low cost and high efficient acoustic modem for underwater sensor networks

Underwater wireless sensor Networks (UWSN) will provide a variety of attractive working fields such as aquaculture, offshore exploitation, biological monitoring as well as water and seafloor pollution, seismic activity and ocean currents. A practical implementation of these applications will require spreading an important number of nodes to facilitate underwater monitoring by means of data acquiring, so it becomes a challenge to develop simple and reliable modem architectures to reduce both the cost in components and the developing time, still being efficient and robust. Moreover power consumption must be also considered due to energy harvesting difficulties in an underwater environment. This work is focused in the design and implementation of a low cost and energy efficient underwater modem. The paper presents a new acoustic modem design based on an original signal-conditioning model optimally adapted to commercial echo sounder based piezoelectric transducers. It represents a very low-cost solution with a power consumption level similar to current terrestrial wireless sensor networks. The modulation and demodulation algorithms are essential to define the modem architecture. In this work, they have been adapted to a low power microcontroller processing capabilities. The proposed modem architecture includes an 8-bit microcontroller and few external analog components. A binary Coherent-FSK modulation has been chosen because it is more efficient in terms of bandwidth than a non-coherent FSK. Coherent FSK modulation algorithm is quite simple, and can be easily implemented in an 8-bit microcontroller with negligible execution time. Demodulation algorithm is more complex and needs a low-power solution. The paper investigates different alternatives, obtaining a new optimal solution including an additional specific processing unit to the microprocessor core. Compared with previous researches that used microcontrollers, the presented approach also improves energy efficiency without lowering bit rate and bandwidth efficiency. The design has a variable gain reception to measure precisely the incoming signal level and obtaining signal quality indicators similar to RSSI used in wireless RF sensor networks. The circuit has been simulated and experimentally tested too with a prototype. Several tests have been carried out using the different alternatives presented. The goal of the first experiments was to characterize the frequency response of the transducers, and validate acoustic wave generation and amplification models obtained by means of simulation. Measurements were also taken to obtain receiver sensitivity and communication efficiency to power variations. Efficient design of both power amplifier and receiver analog processing stages, combined with optimal microcontroller power saving modes has extended estimated battery. As a conclusion, a worthwhile modem has been designed with the following advantages: Ultra-Low power consumption, a small form factor and a low final cost which enable future low cost deployment of underwater sensor networks.