To realize the tremendous potential of the Internet of Underwater Things, the networking community first must find a solution to the problem of submarine connectivity.
After several unsuccessful attempts, American businessman Cyrus West Field finally orchestrated the installation of a transatlantic telegraph cable in the summer of 1858. Stretching nearly 2,000 miles between Trinity Bay, Newfoundland, and Valentia, Ireland — often at depths surpassing two miles — the cable quickly fell prey to the elements and stopped functioning after just two months (by 1866, a more durable cable was successfully installed).
Some 160 years later, we’re on the brink of a new, equally exciting breakthrough in submarine technology: the Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT).
Much has been made of the rise of the Internet of Things (IoT) in the last several years, and with good reason — but the vast majority of industry chatter has revolved around terrestrial IoT applications (as well as some aerial applications, thanks to drones). That means today’s tech visionaries are failing to account for over 70% of the world’s surface.
In reality, however, the IoUT’s sluggish growth can be attributed to the technological challenges of undersea data transmission. IoUT innovators are still in the process of working through many of these challenges, but once they do, the results are likely to be remarkable.
In decades past, the scientific community has primarily relied on remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to explore and engage with everything beneath the surface of our oceans and seas. These vehicles — which are either anchored by a cable or, for shallower operations, remote controlled — are effective enough, but deploying them often requires a large team of experts. With the emergence of the IoUT, however, the prospect of entire fleets of autonomous underwater vehicles (AUVs) is closer than ever to a reality.
Once they achieve reliable connectivity, AUVs promise to revolutionize undersea operations for a variety of industries. For instance, in an age where precise environmental monitoring is only getting more important, AUVs and other sensors could be used to monitor everything from water quality and biological pollution to ocean temperature and thermal pollution on an ongoing basis.
In addition to facilitating this kind of longitudinal undersea data collection, IoUT devices could also be used as early warning systems for marine disasters both manmade and natural. With a robust IoUT, oil companies could create sophisticated networks of underwater sensors and, in the event of a leak or spill, deploy a fleet of AUVs to quickly and safely make repairs.
IoUT sensors could also be used to detect the early indicators of floods, earthquakes, and tsunamis, enabling government officials to take critical, time-sensitive actions earlier and more assuredly than ever before. This kind of advanced warning would have been hugely beneficial in circumstances like those preceding the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster.
But to realize its full potential, the IoUT must first overcome one major problem: unreliable undersea connectivity. According to one research paper, “To support the…IoUT, Underwater Wireless Sensor Networks (UWSNs) have emerged as a promising network system.” The only problem? “[UWSNs] have several unique properties, such as long propagation delay, narrow bandwidth, and low reliability.”
Unfortunately, the electromagnetic waves on which conventional WiFi communication is based only travel between a few centimeters and a few meters underwater (depending on conditions), rendering traditional wireless technology useless in an IoUT context. Acoustic signals not unlike those used by marine mammals for echolocation have been used as an alternative, but they offer extremely limited bandwidth and are easily distorted by background noise from sea life and passing ships.
What’s more, the dynamic topologies of submarine environments make it incredibly difficult to construct network architectures that are stable enough to support a large number of IoUT devices. Consequently, early versions of AUVs are having to return to the surface to transmit large volumes of data, and fixed undersea sensors often have to retransmit their messages, resulting in longer propagation delays and higher bandwidth and energy consumption.
These difficulties notwithstanding, a number of innovators have already taken encouraging strides toward making the IoUT a reality. For instance, Sonardyne’s BlueComm technology uses a high-speed optical modem powered by rapidly modulating LEDs to reliably transmit data at up to 500 Mbps through hundreds of meters of water.
Ultimately, the future of internet connectivity in every arena will be defined by forward-thinking, ambitious new technologies. Things like quantum computing and twisted light promise to revolutionize enterprise networking on land, and it’s only a matter of time before equally powerful innovations are applied to the IoUT. Once they do, the sky’s the limit — or in this case, the ocean floor is.