Practical problems of experimenting with an underwater wireless sensor node platform

Although in recent years many research activities have been carried out on underwater communication, still many challenges need to be tackled to make the underwater communication suitable for real applications. To this end, availability of an open and well-designed platform and performing real-world experiments are crucial. In reality, the real-world experiments have proved to be much more difficult than expected as the underwater communication channel has not yet fully and precisely been modeled and the performance of signal processing part might be varied from application to application. The deployment itself, online debugging, dealing with variable channel characteristics, and packaging are issues making real-life underwater communication experiments challenging. In this paper, we present initial results of dealing with and solving some practical problems of experimenting with an underwater wireless sensor node platform. We also highlight the drawbacks of current underwater research platform as far as deployments are concerned.