Messages in a Bottle

Drift bottles and drift buoys have been used to explore currents and, more recently equipped with sensors, also to record other data about oceans, lakes, and other waters—and occasionally to carry messages or small items in a rather unpredictable fashion. (Moored) buoys may also be equipped with network interfaces to transmit their results or serve as network infrastructure to relay data from, e.g., underwater nodes. In this paper, we explore a low-cost variant for surface-to-surface communication on the water using messaging bottles, characterize their performance in different setups, and provide an implementation in the ONE simulator based upon our findings and a simple drift model for a river.