IEEE International Workshop on Underwater Networks (WUnderNet), 26-29 May 2009, Bradford, UK

More than 70% of the earth's surface is covered by water. Despite having strong influences and impact on climate regulation, nutrient production, oil retrieval and transportation, the oceans remain the least explored frontiers of this planet and many oceanic and maritime applications seem relatively slow in exploiting the state-of-the-art info-communications technologies. The natural and man-made disasters that have taken place over the last few years have aroused significant interest in monitoring oceanic environments for scientific, environmental, commercial, safety, homeland security and military needs. The shipbuilding and offshore engineering industries are also increasingly interested in technologies like sensor networks as an economically viable alternative to currently adopted and costly methods used in seismic monitoring, structural health monitoring, installation and mooring, etc.

The technology used in current remote telemetry and in-situ local sensing systems leaves much to be desired. Ideally, there should be highly precise, real-time, fine grained spatial sampling of the target environment, be it a physical structure like an oil rig, or the ocean bed in the vicinity of frequent seismic activities. Wireless terrestrial ad hoc and sensor networks have been studied extensively but the notion of a wireless underwater network is relatively new due to the lack of an efficient underwater communications technology. The existing viable underwater communications technology is acoustic communications, which is characterized by severely limited range-dependent bandwidth and attenuation, extensive time-varying multipath propagation, long propagation times, and high temporal errors. This is a drastic change from the radio channel used by terrestrial wireless sensor networks and presents new challenges for every aspect of the network protocol suite.

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers and industry experts in areas relevant to underwater networks. Different aspects of the protocol stack from the physical layer to the application layer, as well as cross-layer issues, will be represented. The objective is to serve as a forum for presenting state-of-the-art research, exchanging ideas and experiences, and facilitating interaction and collaboration.

Topics of interest include, but are not limited to:
• Underwater network architecture design
• Novel / Cognitive communications techniques
• Cooperative communications
• Acoustic signal propagation and physical layer issues (modulation, waveform, MIMO etc)
• Delay-Tolerant Networking
• Distributed Signal Processing
• Network coding
• Medium access control
• Routing and data delivery
• Reliability and robustness
• Security Issues
• Power management
• New underwater energy sources
• Localization and synchronization
• Data fusion and aggregation
• Cross layer Optimization
• Performance modeling and simulations
• New applications for underwater networks

Paper Submission

Original full papers should be formatted in a two-column IEEE Computer Society format (URL: http://computer.org/cspress/instruct) and should not exceed 6 (six) pages including figures and references. Submission of a paper should be regarded as a commitment that, if the paper is accepted, at least one of the authors will register and present at the workshop. All submitted papers will be judged based on their quality through peer reviewing, where TPC members are invited to assess the scientific contributions of papers. Accepted papers will be published by the IEEE Computer Society Press and archived in the IEEE Digital Library.

Important Dates

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