By Cory Nealon
The 25-foot motorboat bobbed gently in Lake Erie, south of
downtown Buffalo. It was early afternoon on a warm September day.
Only gulls and sailboats interrupted the sun-filled horizon.
But this was no pleasure cruise. It was the start of a
potentially paradigm-shifting science experiment. Aboard the vessel
were UB doctoral candidates Hovannes Kulhandjian and Zahed Hossain,
and their adviser, Tommaso Melodia, associate professor of
electrical engineering. The team was dropping 40-pound sensors into
the lake to test how the devices could communicate with one another
using sound waves, which travel through water more efficiently than
other modes of communication.
If all goes well, it will be the first step in the creation of
an underwater wireless network, a technological advancement that
could lead to improvements in everything from tsunami detection to
offshore oil and natural gas exploration to the monitoring of
pollution in our waters.
“A submerged wireless network will give us an
unprecedented ability to collect and analyze data from our oceans
in real time,” says Melodia, who’s heading the project.
“Making this information available to anyone with a
smartphone or computer, especially when a tsunami or other type of
disaster occurs, could help save lives.”
Land-based wireless networks use radio waves to transmit
information via satellites and antennae. But radio waves work
poorly underwater, which is why such agencies as the Navy and the
National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) rely on
sonar and other sound wave-based techniques for deep-sea
For example, NOAA uses sound waves to send data from tsunami
sensors on the ocean floor to surface buoys. The buoys convert the
sound waves into radio waves that travel to a satellite, which then
bounces the sound waves back to land-based computers. Many systems
worldwide employ this methodology, Melodia says, but sharing data
among them is difficult because each system has a different
The framework Melodia is developing would solve this problem. It
would transmit data from existing and future underwater sensor
networks to laptops, smartphones and other wireless devices in real
time, using protocols compatible with those that land-based
networks employ. It would be, in other words, a deep-sea
The initial research is going well. Aboard the motorboat, after submerging two sensors into Lake Erie, Kulhandjian typed a command into a laptop and waited. “This is cool stuff,” he said. “The sensor nodes are trying to find each other.” Seconds later, high-pitched chirps ricocheted off a nearby concrete wall. Melodia smiled. The test had worked.