Underwater sensor network using received signal strength of electromagnetic waves

Abstract

We propose a scheme that uses the signal strength received from commercial RF sensors to determine the position of a sensor underwater. The scheme can give accurate position information and has fast update rate, but is limited to short sensor range with the signal identification problem. The infrastructure-based localization and a method that assigns frequency bands to RF sensors can be a solution to overcome this range limitation without loss of update rate or position accuracy. The RF sensor modules are used as ANs, and are easily identified by their channel assignments. To verify the proposed localization scheme, we organized an experimental environment and performed repetitive experiments to track the positions of mobile nodes and stationary nodes in 2D environments. The experimental results showed reliable localization accuracy with fast sampling rate and demonstrates the feasibility of localization that exploits EM wave attenuation.