Underwater Communications in Wireless Sensor Networks using WLAN at 2.4 GHz

In order to have long distance underwater wireless communications, low frequencies must be used. But the main problem when using low frequencies is the lack of bandwidth to transmit high data rate. Sometimes wireless sensors must be placed quite close for taking more accurate measurements from the water, so higher frequency bands could be used in special cases. In this paper we measure the maximum coverage distance of underwater wireless sensors when they are placed at about 15 cm underneath the water surface, without having wireless coverage from the air side. Then, we measured the number of lost packets and round trip time for 1, 2, 5.5 and 11 Mbps at different frequencies for different distances.