OceanSense: Monitoring the Sea with Wireless Sensor Networks

In this project, we explore the possibility of deploying networked sensors on the Ocean's surface, to monitor depth and temperature, as well as other valuable environmental parameters. Sea depth monitoring is a critical task to ensure the safe operation of harbors. Traditional schemes largely rely on labor-intensive work and expensive hardware. We present a new solution for measuring the sea depth with Restricted Floating Sensors. To address the problem of node localization on the changeable sea environment, we propose Perpendicular Intersection (PI), a novel mobile-assisted localization scheme. In the OceanSense project, we propose the concept of passive diagnosis as well as the PAD approach which is both lightweight and adaptive to network dynamics. The OceanSense system has been working for over 16 months and provides large amounts of valuable data about the sea.