Underwater Wireless Communication System with the Internet of Underwater Things

The widespread adoption of underwater wireless communications (UWC) has become an important research area to address a variety of military and commercial applications, and there is growing interest in investigating underwater environments in numerous applications. With the advancement of UWC, the underwater Internet of Things (IoUT) has emerged, and various practical applications are expected, and it is recognized as one of the promising technologies. Acoustic, optical, and radio RF carriers used for data transmission in underwater communication failed to provide expected results, so in this paper, we provided a comparative study of existing UWC techniques, their advantages as compared to existing techniques, and optimized methods for transmission and modulation, and it has been identified that the potential IoUT applications by overcoming the challenges possessed by the existing system. We analyzed how IoUT overcomes the challenges faced by traditional techniques of transmission and modulation without compromising the security measures and leads to more efficient communication with less power consumption and transmission loss.

I. Introduction

The growing need for Underwater wireless communication networks (UWCNs) & subsea monitoring systems has created a plethora of interest in advancing the enabling technologies with fast & accurate solutions for their deployment. The high data rate requirement for coordination & sharing of information between sensors & Aerial Unmanned Vehicles (AUVs) makes the provision of security & modulation challenges. Underwater communication is more challenging as compared to the above ground due to factors such as multipath propagation, channel timing jitter, limited available bandwidth, and severe signal attenuation. At present Acoustic, Radio Frequency (RF) waves, & Visible light communication (VLC) with Optical Communication are used. Underwater communication uses acoustic waves instead of Electromagnetic (EM) waves which is less efficient because Acoustic waves are not able to transmit data at high speed. EM waves propagate faster than acoustic waves and EM waves can acquire high data rates over short distances in shallow water. [1] VLC can solve these problems. The idea is to use the hybrid technique of acoustic & optical communication along with modulation techniques to give the message signals transmitting from Unmanned Underwater Vehicle (UUV) accurately with the carrier with less bandwidth allocation & propagation delay. The idea of a hybrid communication scheme combining Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing-Interleave Division Multiple Access (OFDM-IDMA) schemes, which uses IDMA instead of CDMA in OFDM-CDMA, with ease of handling ISI and effective mitigation of cross. [1] [2] [3]