Abstract—This paper aims at presenting an power IoT platform that integrates underwater sensors. The
experimented low power Internet of Things architecture, rest of the paper is structured as follows. Section II presents
that could be integrated to underwater monitoring the related works to low power IoT schemes. Section III
systems like Autonomous Underwater Vehicles for describes the proposed architecture. In section IV, the
wireless underwater sensing. The proposed hardware implemented low power communication protocols are
architecture of the sensor nodes is based on an ultra- described. The experimental results are presented in Section
low-power Flash Micro-controller that takes V. Finally, conclusions are given in Section VI.
measurements from water sensors, and synchronizes the II. RELATED WORKS
network by means of a GPS. The receiver board
incorporates a Digital Signal Processor and a Flash A. IoT Technologies
MCU that communicates data to a local server The number of IoT applications is growing in many
implemented on a RaspberryPI unit. Moreover, this areas including smart home, healthcare monitoring, smart
paper proposes mechanisms to minimize the power city, utilities, smart agriculture, security, smart water,
consumption of the realized system. Laboratory industrial control, environmental monitoring, and more.
experiments and sea trials have been conducted Recent advancements in wireless communication and
successfully with water depth and temperature sensors embedded systems make wireless sensor networks as a
and showed the capability of the developed system to prominent asset of Internet of Things [5].
measure the real temperature and depth of the water Many relevant works have been published in relation to
and gather the measured data to the local server with IoT technologies: The paper [6] gave a survey of IoT
the minimum power consumption. platforms, protocols and applications and proposed a
framework integrating different protocols. In the paper [7],
Keywords—IoT; power saving; underwater sensors; authors proposed a wireless temperature monitoring system
wireless communication based on ZigBee module that showed the capability to solve
wiring issues, limited adaptability, and other issues related
I. INTRODUCTION to distributed wireless temperature monitoring system.
Nowadays, there is an increasing demand of battery- Moreover, there are a number of hardware platforms
operated IoT applications in underwater environment. developed for IoT purpose, as listed by [8], [9] and [10].
Indeed, battery power saving and optimization become one
of the major concerns in the IoT sector view that IoT B. Power saving in IoT
devices mostly operate on batteries and need to reach Many researchers have been carried out for power
lifetimes of several years without battery replacement [1]. saving of IoT devices. Methodologies were presented in
Hence, there are extensive researches happening both in [11] [15] [16] to characterize the power consumption of
hardware and networking areas to optimize the power embedded applications and operating systems based on
consumption of IoT devices. high-level specifications and physical measurements in
order to build power models.
Various IoT embedded systems have been studied in
terrestrial, however, they cannot be applied directly to The work [12] proposed an execution driven simulation
underwater because of attenuation of Global Positioning testbed that measures the execution behavior and power
System (GPS) and Radio Frequency (RF) signals consumption of embedded applications and RTOS. A
underwater, making the communication between sensors comprehensive model for the power consumption of
underwater particularly challenging [2]. wireless sensor nodes was examined in [21].
Recently, we proposed novel architectures and The paper [13] conducted a general study on aspects of
realizations that allow to sensors to communicate Operating System design and implementation. They
underwater through acoustic waves [3] [4]. In the present investigated low power modes of embedded devices and
paper, we follow up by proposing an experimented low proposed energy efficient techniques to use operating
The paper [19] presented a framework to reduce power B. Receiver host architecture:
consumption of M2M / IoT devices by buffering data, The receiver host architecture, presented in Fig. 2,
which keeps IoT devices and gateway nodes in sleep mode incorporates a fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP)
as long as possible. Potsh et al [20] proposed a measurement [24] based on an advanced modified Harvard architecture
solution for tracking the highly dynamic power which provides an arithmetic logic unit (ALU) with a high
consumption of modern wireless embedded systems found degree of parallelism, application-specific hardware logic,
in many IoT devices. on-chip memory, and additional on-chip peripherals.
In [22], a network assistance platform was proposed for The GPS module provides the time synchronization to
saving power consumption of IoT devices. The platform the receiver host. Once immersed, the acoustic pulses
enables a server and smart devices to monitor and control coming from the sensor nodes are received through the
operation modes of the IoT devices. Besides, researchers acoustic receiver chain. The DSP computes the Time of
presented in [23] a comparison of the expected lifetime for Arrival (ToA) of received pulses, interprets the values of
IoT devices operating in several wireless networks: IEEE battery level, temperature and water depth received from
802.15.4/e, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), IEEE 802.11 each sensor node, and sends the computed data to the Flash
Power Saving Mode (PSM), IEEE 802.11ah, as well as in MCU which transfers it to the local server through TCP/IP.
new emerging long-range technologies such as LoRa and
SIGFOX.
III. PROPOSED ARCHITECTURE
A. Sensor nodes architecture
The sensor nodes architecture, presented in Fig. 1, is
based on an ultra-low-power consumption flash
microcontroller (Flash MCU) that features a powerful 16-bit
Reduced Instruction Set Computing "RISC" architecture,
16-bit registers, and constant generators that contribute to
maximum code efficiency.
The Flash MCU manages the communication with the
water sensors, the GPS module and the acoustic transmitter.
The water sensors are immersed underwater to measure the
physical characteristics such as the temperature of water and
the depth of the seafloor. A Time synchronization is Fig. 2. Schematic diagram of the receiver host components
required for many reasons: (1) Coordination and
collaboration of sensor nodes need a common timescale. (2) Inter-processor communications were implemented
Sensor nodes need synchronization to manage sleep and between the Flash MCU and the DSP based on the Host
wake up times. (3) Many scheduling algorithms need time Port Interface link (HPI) [25]: A high speed parallel port
synchronization. The GPS module is used to provide the through which the Flash MCU can directly access to DSP
time synchronization to sensor nodes on the surface. The memory space. An HPI software has been developed on the
measured battery level and the sensed temperature and Flash MCU to perform inter-processor communications
depth are transmitted through water to a distant receiver by between the Flash MCU and DSP. The main C functions
means of an acoustic transmitter that incorporates a piezo- that were developed are:
ceramic sensor to transform electrical signals to mechanical
vibrations transmitting through water. HPI_init(): Initialize HPI link.
HPI_read(): Read a 16-bits from DSP memory.
HPI_write(): Write a 16-bits to DSP memory.
HPI_isr(): Handle interrupts from DSP. hardware configuration is not required, TDMA provides a
great deal of flexibility and tthe sensor nodes can be turned
HPI_dspInt(): Interrupt DSP through HPI link. off during idle periods, there
thereby prolonging the battery life.
C. GPS Time Synchronization However, a strict time synchron
synchronization is required amongst
all sensor nodes, which implies that sensor nodes must
The hardware architecture of GPS synchronization, remain synchronized even during node failures or node
shown in Fig. 3, is based on the Flash MCU and a GPS movement in order to maintain the transmissions schedule
schedule.
module. An embedded software has been developed on the
Flash MCU to manage the interface to the GPS receiver Hence, the TDMA is adopted for the actual sy system. The
through Universal Asynchronous Receiver/Transmitter time synchronization is provided by GPS. Moreover, the
(UART) link. This allows to synchronize the clock of each acoustic communications
cations presents a large propagation
sensor in reference to the UTC time, received from GPS delays, thus, each time slot must be long enough to avoid
module.. Because of the disability of GPS underwater, the collisions,, which increases the turn
turn-around time depending
process of GPS time synchronization is performed in
i Air, the number of sensor nodes. Fig. 4 shows an example of
before launching sensor nodes into the water. implementation of TDMA scheduling protocol for five
sensor nodes. The turn-around
around time is defined as the period
between two successive transmittions of the same sensor
node.
Fig. 3. Schematic diagram of the UART link between the GPS and the
Flash MCU.
3500
3000
Autonomy (Hours)
2500
2000
Fig. 5. Schematic diagram showing the implementation of the duty cycle 1500
mechanism on three the sensor nodes. The Horizontal axis is divided 1000
following the TDMA slots allocations. The vertical axis illustrates the 500
variation of the current consumption during each level.
0
V. EXPERIMENTS
Turn around time (hours)
A. Temperature monitoring
The laboratory setup of temperature monitoring system Fig. 7. Battery autonomy measurements plots (Horizontal axis) depending
the TDMA turn-around time:: from 1 hour to 48 hours (Vertical axis).
contains a Flash MCU, a temperature sensor and a local
server. The Flash MCU collects the sensed
ensed data from the We notice that the battery autonomy increases when the
temperature sensor, and sends measurements to the server turn-around
around time increases. The current consumption of the
through MQTT protocol. Fig. 6 illustrates the plot of a set of sensor nodes depends significantl
significantly to the amount of current
temperature measurements stored by the server database. consumed during transmission.
sion. This confirms the benefits of
These measurements were qualified and validated in implementing the duty cycle modemode, which minimizes the
reference to a calibrated temperature sensor. transmission current. The autonomy becomes less sensitive
to the TDMA turn-around
around variation where values of the
Measurements have been performed to qualify the
turn-around exceed 10 hours
hours. An autonomy of 3000 hours
benefits of using the MQTT protocol compared to the t
could be obtained.
Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP).. The obtained results
showed that the MQTT reduces (by a factor of five) the time C. Battery level measurements
required for transmitting data from the Flash MCU to the
server, which reduces notably the power consumption of the The objective of these measurements is to qualify the
receiver host. ability of the sensor node to monitor the voltage level
supplied by its batteries power supply. Fig. 8 shows the
measured battery discharge rate
rate.