Low-power acoustic modem for dense underwater sensor networks

Significant progress has been made in terrestrial sensor networks to revolutionize sensing and data collection. To bring the concept of long-lived, dense sensor networks to the underwater environment, there is a compelling need to develop low-cost and low-power acoustic modems for short-range communications. This paper presents our work in designing and developing such a modem. We describe our design rationale followed by details of both hardware and software development. We have performed preliminary tests with transducers for in-air communications.