About Us

Overview:

The oceans cover 71% of the earth's surface and represent one of the least explored frontiers, yet the oceans are integral to climate regulation, nutrient production, oil retrieval and transportation. As such, there is significant interest in monitoring aquatic environments for scientific, environmental, commercial, safety, and military reasons. While there is a need for highly precise, real-time, fine grained spatio-temporal sampling of the ocean environment, current methods such as remote telemetry and sequential local sensing cannot satisfy current needs, let alone future needs. The notion of an underwater network is relatively new due to the lack of maturity of underwater acoustic communication. However, networks are critical in order to achieve the monitoring goals noted above. The physical challenges of acoustic underwater communication and the complexity of diverse aquatic environments require us to completely re-think how a network should be deployed in underwater environments. Challenges to be overcome by underwater acoustic modem and network designers include: severely limited range-dependent bandwidth and attenuation, extensive time-varying multi-path propagation, and low speed of sound propagation in water resulting in long propagation delays. Moreover, a unique feature of underwater networks is that nodes can passively move due to water currents and dispersion. All the above distinct features of underwater networks yield grand challenges for every level of the network protocol suite.

The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practioners in areas relevant to underwater networks. Thus, many layers of the "stack" from the physical layer to the application layer will be represented. The objective is to serve as a forum for presenting state of the art research, exchanging ideas and experiences, and facilitating interaction and collaboration.

Steering Committee:

Ian F. Akyildiz (Georgia Institute of Technology)
Jun-Hong Cui (University of Connecticut, Chair)
David Hung-Chang Du (University of Minnesota/NSF)
Kevin Fall (Intel Research, Berkeley)

Robert H. Headrick (Office of Naval Research)
John Heidemann (University of Southern California/ISI)

Urbashi Mitra (University of Southern California)
Milica Stojanovic (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Welcome to WUWNet!