Speaker: Zheng Peng, assistant research professor, University of Connecticut

Time: 9:00- 10:00 am, June 12, 2015

Venue: Room 202, Second Floor, Office Building, Software Campus

Host：Baoquan Chen

Title: Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks: Fundamentals and New Frontiers

Abstract: The Earth is a water planet. For decades, there have been significant interests in monitoring aquatic environments for scientific exploration, commercial exploitation and coastline protection. The idea of applying sensor networks into underwater environments (i.e., forming underwater wireless sensor networks, UWSNs) has received rapidly increasing interests in recent years. This new technology can transform the way we understand, explore and utilize the sparsely sampled oceans, estuaries, lakes and rivers. Even though UWSNs share some common properties with terrestrial wireless sensor networks, such as “wireless” communication and energy constraints, UWSNs are significantly different from its counterpart on land: in water, due to the high attenuation of radios, acoustic communication has been proved to be the most viable way for data transmission. The unique features of underwater acoustic channels (low available bandwidth, long propagation delays, high error rates and high temporal/spatial dynamics)and often the harsh deployment environment require new research at every layer of the protocol stack (from the physical layer to the application layer) and new networking infrastructure to implement, test and compare the solutions.

This talk will first provide an overview of UWSNs, including the basic architecture, research challenges, applications and current progresses. Then a new frontier technology, called eco-friendly underwater cognitive acoustic networks (UCANs), will be discussed with details. In oceans, both natural acoustic systems (such as marine animals) and man-made acoustic systems (such as underwater acoustic networks and sonar users) use acoustic signals for various purposes, including communication, echolocation, sensing, and/or detection. The wide use of sound makes the already limited acoustic bandwidth even a more scarce resource. Further, there are growing concerns about the effect of the man-made noise (from UWSNs, oil drilling, sonar systems, etc.) on marine mammals as the interference may be fatal to them. Then how to efficiently utilize the acoustic bandwidth while minimizing the interferences to marine animals is a central issue to address in UCAN. After presenting UCAN, the speaker will also cover several other research efforts he has pursued in the past several years. 

Bio: Zheng Peng received a Bachelor degree in Control Science and Engineering and a Bachelor degree in Computer Science from Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China in 2002. He obtained a Master degree in Computer Science from University of Electrical Science and Technology of China in 2005, and later his Ph.D. from University of Connecticut, Storrs, USA. He is currently an assistant research professor at the University of Connecticut. He leads research projects in the area of underwater sensor networks and the next generation underwater technology. His main research interests cover the design, modelling, and performance evaluation of networks and embedded/distributed systems.