Micro-Electromechanical Systems for Underwater Environments

Abstract

Underwater networking technologies have brought us unforeseen ways to explore the unexplored aquatic environment and this way provided us with a large number of different kinds of applications for environmental, scientific, commercial, and military purposes. Although precise and continuous aquatic environment monitoring capability is highly important for various underwater applications, due to the unique characteristics of underwater networks such as low communication bandwidth, high error rate, node mobility, large propagation delay, and harsh underwater environmental conditions, existing solutions cannot be applied directly to underwater networks. Therefore, new solutions considering the unique features of underwater environment are highly demanded. In this chapter, the authors mainly focus on the use of wireless micro-electromechanical systems for underwater networks and present its advantages. In addition, the authors investigate the challenges and open research issues of wireless MEMS to provide an insight into future research opportunities.