Design and implementation of high-speed communication modem using ultrasonic sensors for underwater sensor networks

Underwater sensor networks (USN) for ocean development and disaster prevention have been emerged as one of interesting research topics recently. Since low-power, high-speed and inexpensive communication modem is a prerequisite for deployment of USN, in this paper we design and implement an underwater modem by utilizing general-purpose waterproof ultrasonic sensors. Also, we make some experiments in a water tank containing two point-to-point modems. According to the experiments, nearly error-free communication is possible at a distance of 1 meter with a data rate of 1 kbps and communication quality is rapidly deteriorated by the increase of data rate.