Construction and basic performance tests of an underwater monitoring network

With the rapid development of the economy, environmental pollution has become one of the major problems in coastal areas and in cities along rivers. Real-time observations of the water quality along rivers have been considered to be an efficient way to control wastewater emission and manage environmental water quality. Traditional ways to observe the ocean environment, including satellite telemetry, radar, investigation ships, ocean observation stations, etc., are not applicable for water-quality observations along rivers because of their high cost, poor real-time information, low accuracy, and so on. Based on wireless sensor networks (WSN), the study reported here proposes a new observation system using underwater multisensory information. After processing the multisensory data from each sensor, the system transmits it to a hub node through WSN, and then transmits it to a land data center through a general packet radio service (GPRS) wireless network. In order to check the basic performance of this system, we completed a node positioning experiment based on a GPS module, and a communication experiment based on ZigBee. This article reports the design of the hardware and the experimental results.