Planning Workshop: Addressing Wireless Communication Needs in Underwater Technologies. The Workshop is Scheduled to be Held in the Fall of 2020.

Lehigh University, Bethlehem PA

Investigators

Abstract

Oceans, lakes and rivers cover more than 70 percent of the Earth surface with water and the value of key ocean assets is estimated to be over $24 trillion. Therefore, it is of great importance to sustain the growth of the blue economy and develop the ocean technologies, such as ocean energy harvesting, Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUV), and Internet of Underwater Things (IoUT), etc. However, underwater wireless communication has been a long-standing bottleneck to advancing ocean technologies because the physical communication media are hostile to radio frequency, optical, or acoustical means of wireless communications. The future growth of blue economy especially calls for underwater wireless communication technologies that are reliable, medium-distance, and high data-rate. This planning workshop is to invite 50 -- 100 researchers from different sectors of underwater technologies and discuss funding recommendations via two days of Zoom meetings. The goal is to engage the multiple sectors of stakeholders including underwater infrastructure and environmental monitoring, offshore fishing and aquaculture, offshore oil and gas and energy harvesting, diving and recreation, scientific research, and military surveillance. The specific objectives of the workshop are to answer the questions regarding the most important applications, performance requirements, and environmental impacts of underwater wireless communications for the research community to focus on in the next five to ten years, and the recommended funding mechanisms and research topics for the research community to achieve the desired technology advances. The outcome of the planning workshop will aid the NSF to create a potential funding program that aims at advancing the underwater wireless technolgies. The workshop has the potential to engage researchers from different ocean technology sectors and foster multi-disciplinary research. The workshop findings will be disseminated through website sharing and conference presentation, and will be used to create course modules with the entrepreneurial mindset learning (EML) approach. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.