Implementation of a wireless multi-hop network for supporting oyster farming

Abstract

The labor shortage is a serious issue in oyster farming. To solve this problem, technologies like IoT are considered to automate the collection and management of real-time sensor information such as water quality. Furthermore, oyster farms are often deployed in small spaces, with multiple tanks and frequent movement from workers, so wired communication is difficult to install and maintain. These limitations make it an ideal environment to deploy a wireless multi-hop network. In this work, we created such network that integrates sensors and communication modules, operated by batteries. Our communication system considers a wireless multi-hop network using the popular IoT protocol ZigBee, which is efficient in short-distance communication and has a low energy print. Radio waves are significantly attenuated underwater, therefore, we considered this factor in our evaluations to estimate the communication range accurately. Our preliminary experiments, quantitatively measured underwater communication performance in a controlled environment.