Aqua-OS: An Operating System for Underwater Acoustic Networks

Underwater acoustic networks have recently emerged as a promising approach for oceanic applications such as exploration and surveillance. This new type of networks differs from terrestrial wireless sensor networks in that the network nodes are powerful and well equipped with many resources for diverse applications in challenging environments. Existing operating systems for terrestrial wireless sensor networks may not be able to fully utilize the resources available in underwater networks or work efficiently in the underwater environment with diverse application requirements. This calls for a new operating system design for underwater acoustic networks. Motivated by this, we propose a plan to implement an operating system for underwater acoustic networks: Aqua-OS. Aqua-OS is going to be robust, highly customizable and energy efficient to tackle the harsh underwater environment, fully utilize the hardware resources and meet the diverse application requirements.