Abstract
In this paper, a new method for gaining the control of standalone underwater sensor nodes based on sensing the power supply evolution is presented. Underwater sensor networks are designed to support multiple extreme scenarios such as network disconnections. In those cases, the sensor nodes involved should go into standalone, and its wired and wireless communications should be disabled. This paper presents how to exit from the standalone status and enter into debugging mode following a practical ultra-low power design methodology. In addition, the discharge and regeneration effects are analyzed and modeled to minimize the error using the sensor node self measurements. Once the method is presented, its implementation details are discussed including other solutions like wake up wireless modules or a pin interruption solution. Its advantages and disadvantages are discussed. The method proposed is evaluated with several simulations and laboratory experiments using a real aquaculture sensor node. Finally, all the results obtained demonstrate the usefulness of our new method to gain the control of a standalone sensor node. The proposal is better than other approaches when the hibernation time is longer than 167.45 s. Finally, our approach requires two orders of magnitude less energy than the best practical solution.
Highlights
The practical deployment and usage of an underwater sensor network in real applications makes mandatory at least the isolation of their sensor nodes
This paper proposes to use the charging process of the battery included in the standalone sensor node for gaining control over it
This study focuses the attention of the reader on the power consumption analysis of each sensor node subsystem when it is built with commercial offthe-shelf (COTS) peripherals
Summary
The practical deployment and usage of an underwater sensor network in real applications makes mandatory at least the isolation of their sensor nodes. The isolation condition of the sensor nodes promotes the research of wireless solutions like ultrasonic or with RFID, for example, or specific connectors for wired communications [2]. When a failure arises in communications the sensor nodes go into standalone mode. Despite of this failure, each sensor node still remains executing its programmed measurement schedule. It continues acquiring data that become locally stored when there is memory available. This scenario defines a very common corner case in sensor networks
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