AquaStream: Multihop Multimedia Streaming Over Acoustic Channel in Severely Resource-Constrained IoT Networks

Robust and reliable communication systems, whether based on electromagnetic (EM) waves or light, fail to perform under water due to very high attenuation and changing visibility conditions. The present generation of systems designed for underwater communications relies mostly on acoustic waves, typically in the ultrasonic frequency range. In this work, we develop and evaluate a means of implementing underwater acoustic channel-based severely constrained IoT networks using low-cost, off-the-shelf, open hardware electronics and transducers, which can support direct communication between two nodes at a data rate of 2.4 kbps for over 65 m. These nodes can be deployed over much longer distances through multihop relay topologies. Furthermore, we evaluate the efficacy of our system toward supporting multimedia data transmission and even attempt multimedia streaming through our deployed underwater IoT network using video compression and reduced sampling of the video frames. We observe that the system successfully supports multihop network topologies and undertakes multimedia transmission by compromising the quality of the data. The system has a clear tradeoff between data quality, transmission range, and transmission delays.