Sensors on sea (SOS): a simple novel sensor-based best-effort system for ocean related disaster management

Rapid advances in hardware technologies and the ability to build smaller and more powerful computing devices that are capable of networking and sharing information amongst themselves has rendered the large scale production of inexpensive, short-range wireless sensors feasible. Sensor networks have a wide spectrum of applicability, including environmental monitoring, pollution tracking, surveillance, structural fault detection, and design of smart environments. In this paper, we study the applicability of sensors to ocean related disaster management. We present sensors on sea (SOS); a simple, novel, best-effort system for ocean related disaster management using short-range, low-power wireless sensors. SOS strives to progressively and collaboratively build an aggregated global knowledge of sensor measurements, which can be reported to a pick-up station, once a sensor is within transmission range. We have studied the performance of SOS, in terms of the effective number successful feedback one can obtain from a sensor cluster, using a custom developed simulator. Our results are quite encouraging and suggest that the aggregated reports will contain measurements from a high fraction of the sensor cluster, with redundancy, thus reinforcing the applicability of sensors in ocean related disaster management.