Ultrasonic communication in wireless sensor networks

RF and acoustic communications are widely used in terrestrial wireless sensor networks and underwater environments, respectively. In this paper, we explore the use of ultrasonic communication in terrestrial wireless sensor networks. We aim to investigate the ultrasonic channel in order to observe whether reliable communication is possible among the nodes of an ultrasonic wireless sensor network as an alternative to an RF-based network. Since ultrasound has not been popularly utilized for communication purposes so far, we inspect in this paper some characteristics of the ultrasonic channel with an experimental setup utilizing ultrasonic transmitters and receivers.