An experimental testbed of an Internet of Underwater Things

A number of critical features have so far slowed down the realization of an Internet of Underwater Things. The most relevant of these aspects are related to the unreliability of the communication channel, the long propagation delay and the effect of severe multi-path and fading. This paper presents the design and development of a hybrid underwater-terrestrial IoT where different underwater sensors collect heterogeneous data and use marine acoustic modems to send information to a gateway device; this is able to set up a long distance link, implemented through a LoRaWAN connection, to forward data to a remote cloud for further processing. Performance of this system has been tested in a real scenario, thereby assessing the feasibility of sending data and images in a real network.