An integrated acoustic/LoRa system for transmission of multimedia sensor data over an Internet of Underwater Things

In the last years, underwater research has been gaining momentum due to the plethora of emerging application scenarios that are appearing, typically associated to marine wildlife protection, national borders monitoring or underwater historical sites preservation. However, research in this area is still at infancy, and implementation of the Internet of Underwater Things vision is not yet at its adulthood. One of the most critical issues is indeed associated to the need for developing a network of devices which can connect and remotely deliver data to a front-end elaboration center. To this purpose, the need for increasing network lifetime and improving the quality of the monitored parameters, while guaranteeing real time control of the network, calls for the design of tools for remotisation, actuation and control. In this paper we report about the design and development of an integrated acoustic/LoRa system for transmission of multimedia sensor data over the Internet of Underwater Things. We detail the blocks composing the system and show results obtained through field tests that assess the possibility to transmit multimedia data, as well as control data, for real time reconfiguration of the system parameters through properly designed Android or Web applications.