More than the 70% of the earth surface is covered with water (almost all of that is the ocean). New technologies have brought us new ways to monitor and sense aquatic environments. Marine surveillance, pollution detection and monitoring, and oceanographic data collection are needed to explore, protect, and commercial exploit the aquatic environment. Many potential applications exist such as fish and mussels grow observation, deep-sea archaeology, seismic and volcanic prediction, oil monitoring and so on.
This special issue tries to collect the recent advances on underwater sensors and underwater sensor networks to measure, monitor, surveillance and control underwater environments. Because of the environment nature, many features must be taken into account: the need of large number of nodes, limited energy of the nodes, short-distance radio communications, large propagation latency, low bandwidth capacity and high error rate. All these constraints make underwater sensors and underwater sensor networks a special case of the regular ones.
Contributions from 8th IEEE International Conference on Mobile Ad-hoc and Sensor Systems (IEEE MASS 2011) with extended results are welcomed, Contributions from the 4th and 5th IEEE/IFIP International Workshop on Ubiquitous UnderWater Sensor Network (UUWSN2010 and UUWSN2011) with extended results are welcomed, Manuscripts from conferences of IEEE MASS 2011 and UUWSN should have at least 40% extension compared with the conference ones.
Topics of interest of this special issue include, but are not limited to, the following topics:
- Sensor nodes to measure water parameters (salinity, conductivity, turbidity, pH, oxygen, temperature, depth, etc.)
- Sediments and pollution sensor nodes
- Acoustic sensors
- Underwater sensor network architectures
- Wired and wireless protocols for underwater sensor networks
- Localization systems for underwater wireless sensor networks
- Target tracking using underwater sensor networks
- Optical, acoustic and electromagnetic communications for underwater sensor networks
- Modems for underwater sensor networks
- Study cases, implementations and real deployments of underwater sensor networks
- Routing protocols specialized for underwater wireless sensor networks
- Cooperation in underwater sensor networks
- Modeling and simulation in underwater sensor networks
- Data collection, storage, and retrieval by underwater sensor network
